English

Magnitude and diversity of trees

Metric Geometry 2026-05-06 v1

Abstract

We compute the magnitude (an isometric invariant of metric spaces) of compact R\mathbb{R}-trees and show that it equals 1+L/21 + L/2, where L[0,]L \in [0, \infty] denotes the total length. Although length is the only geometric invariant captured by magnitude, we show that diversity-maximizing measures on compact R\mathbb{R}-trees are more sensitive to the branching structure as they tend to be more concentrated toward the leaves: their support contains no branch points. In the finite case, we further show that maximum diversity on a weighted tree can be computed in polynomial time.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.03681,
  title  = {Magnitude and diversity of trees},
  author = {Philippe Bouafia},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.03681},
  year   = {2026}
}