The structure and distances in Yule recursive trees

Based on uniform recursive trees, we introduce random trees with the factor of time, which are named Yule recursive trees. The structure and the distance between the vertices in Yule recursive trees are investigated in this paper. For arbitrary time t > 0, we first give the probability that a Yule recursive tree Yt is isomorphic to a given rooted tree γ ; and then prove that the asymptotic distribution of ζt,m, the number of the branches of size m, is the Poisson distribution with parameter λ = 1/m. Finally, two types of distance between vertices in Yule recursive trees are studied, and some limit theorems for them are established. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Random Struct. Alg., 31, 273–287, 2007