Mathematical and Computational challenges in Reconstructing Evolution

Reconstructing evolutionary histories is a basic step in much biological discovery, as well as in historical linguistics and other domains. Inference methods based on mathematical models of evolution have been used to make substantial advances, including in understanding the early origins of life, to predicting protein structures and functions, and to addressing questions such as "Where did the Indo-European languages begin?" In this talk, I will describe the current state of the art in phylogeny estimation in these domains, what is understood from a mathematical perspective, and identify fascinating open problems where novel mathematical research - drawing from graph theory, algorithms, and probability theory - is needed. This talk will be accessible to mathematicians, computer scientists, and probabilists, and does not require any knowledge in biology.