Isolating a Leaf in Rooted Trees via Random Cuttings

Abstract.

We consider a recursive procedure for destroying rooted trees and isolating a leaf by removing a random edge and keeping the subtree, which does not contain the original root. For two tree families, the simply generated tree families and increasing tree families, we study here the number of random cuts that are necessary to isolate a leaf. We can show limiting distribution results of this parameter for simply generated trees and certain increasing trees.