To See the Forest for the Trees: On the Infinite Divisibility of Unlabeled Forests

Abstract Inspired by Stufler’s recent probabilistic proof of Otter’s asymptotic number of unlabeled trees, we revisit work of Palmer and Schwenk, and study unlabeled forests from a probabilistic point of view. We show that the number of trees in a random forest converges, with all of its moments, to a shifted compound Poisson. We also find the asymptotic proportion of forests that are trees. The key fact is that the number of trees and the number of forests are related by a Lévy process. As such, the results by Palmer and Schwenk follow by an earlier and far-reaching limit theory by Hawkes and Jenkins. We also show how this limit theory implies results by Schwenk and by Meir and Moon, related to degrees in large random trees. Our arguments apply, more generally, to the enumeration of subexponentially weighted integer partitions, or, in fact, any setting where the underlying Lévy process follows the one big jump principle.