John D. Cook 8/5/2026

Enumerating trees and circles

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This article discusses the enumeration of rooted trees and their surprising equivalence to configurations of non-overlapping circles. It builds on a previous post about counting rooted trees, explaining that the number of rooted trees with n nodes equals the number of ways to arrange n-1 non-overlapping circles. The author presents a natural bijection using parenthetical notation: leaves are (), and trees are represented as multisets of children. Examples for trees with 1 to 5 nodes are given, showing the correspondence by removing outer parentheses and forming circles. This is a theoretical computer science/mathematics topic relevant to combinatorics and algorithm design.

Enumerating trees and circles

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