Singularity analysis and the large scale behaviour of combinatorial structures

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Many problems from the natural sciences and computing theory are modelled using discrete combinatorial objects, such as trees, sequences, and random walks. Interesting applications require an understanding of the properties of these objects when they are extremely large. The models aid in predicting the run-time of algorithms, properties of genomes, and phase transitions in chemical processes. Naive strategies are quickly overwhelmed by the sheer size of the objects. Formal power series (known as generating functions in this context) have proved to be an efficient and effective way to study enumerative questions, offer insights into distributions of important parameters, and other large scale behavioural questions notably when tools like exhaustive generation are no longer feasible.