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Cayley’s formula for the number of trees

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Abstract

One of the most beautiful formulas in enumerative combinatorics concerns the number of labeled trees. Consider the set N = {1, 2, . . . , n}. How many different trees can we form on this vertex set? Let us denote this number by T n . Enumeration “by hand” yields T 1 = 1, T 2 = 1, T 3 = 3, T 4 = 16, with the trees shown in the following table.

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References

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Aigner, M., Ziegler, G.M. (2010). Cayley’s formula for the number of trees. In: Proofs from THE BOOK. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00856-6_30

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