Analytic Combinatorics – A Worked Example

Analytic Combinatorics -- A Worked Example 08 Apr 2025 - Tags: sage Another day, another blog post that starts with “I was on mse the other day…”. This time, someone asked an interesting question amounting to “how many unordered rooted ternary trees with $n$ nodes are there, up to isomorphism?”. I’m a sucker for these kinds of combinatorial problems, and after finding a generating function solution I wanted to push myself to get an asymptotic approximation using Flajolet–Sedgewick style analytic combinatorics! I’ve never actually done this before, so I learned a lot, and I want to share some of the things I learned – especially how to do this stuff in sage! Now, you might be thinking – didn’t you write a very similar blog post three years ago? Yes. Yes I did. Did I also completely forget what was in that post? Yes. Yes I did, haha. For some reason I was getting it mixed up with this other post from even more years ago, which isn’t nearly as relevant. Thankfully it didn’t matter much ... Read full article.