A brief sketch on the relevance and history of tree balance

Abstract

As indicated in Chapter 1, measures of tree balance occur in a variety of contexts, ranging from evolutionary biology, to cancer research, to theoretical computer science. In the latter, balance concepts have played a significant role in the research on optimal search trees [1, 86, 108], i.e., treelike data structures that allow for an efficient data retrieval. In this context, various trees as for instance AVL trees [2], red-black trees [61], 𝐵 trees [11, 12], and weight balanced trees [108], have been proposed and studied over the past six decades.