On the Variety of Shapes on the Fringe of a Random Recursive Tree

Abstract

We consider a variety of subtrees of various shapes lying on the fringe of a recursive tree. We prove that (under suitable normalization) the number of isomorphic images of a given fixed tree shape on the fringe of the recursive tree is asymptotically Gaussian. The parameters of the asymptotic normal distribution involve the shape functional of the given tree. The proof uses the contraction method.