Leaf-to-leaf distances in Catalan trees

Abstract

We study the average leaf-to-leaf path lengths on ordered Catalan tree graphs with $n$ nodes and show that these are equivalent to the average length of paths starting from the root node. We give an explicit analytic formula for the average leaf-to-leaf path length as a function of separation of the leaves and study its asymptotic properties. At the heart of our method is a strategy based on an abstract graph representation of generating functions.