Mumford dendrograms and discrete p-adic symmetries

In this article, we present an effective encoding of dendrograms by embedding them into the Bruhat-Tits trees associated to p-adic number fields. As an application , we show how strings over a finite alphabet can be encoded in cyclotomic extensions of Qp and discuss p-adic DNA encoding. The application leads to fast p-adic agglomerative hierarchic algorithms similar to the ones recently used e.g. by A. Khrennikov and others. From the viewpoint of p-adic geometry, to encode a dendrogram X in a p-adic field K means to fix a set S of K-rational punctures on the p-adic projective line P 1. To P 1 \ S is associated in a natural way a subtree inside the Bruhat-Tits tree which recovers X, a method first used by F. Kato in 1999 in the classification of discrete subgroups of PGL2(K). Next, we show how the p-adic moduli space M0,n of P 1 with n punctures can be applied to the study of time series of dendrograms and those symmetries arising from hyperbolic actions on P 1. In this way, we can associate to certain classes of dynamical systems a Mumford curve, i.e. a p-adic algebraic curve with totally degenerate reduction modulo p. Finally, we indicate some of our results in the study of general discrete actions on P 1 , and their relation to p-adic Hurwitz spaces.