Probabilistic enumeration and equivalence of nonisomorphic trees

Abstract

We present a new probabilistic proof of Otter's asymptotic formula for the number of unlabelled trees with a given number of vertices. We additionally prove a new approximation result, showing that the total variation distance between random P\'olya trees and random unlabelled trees tends to zero when the number of vertices tends to infinity. In order to demonstrate that our approach is not restricted to trees we extend our results to tree-like classes of graphs.