It is shown that for many branch groups $G$ the action on the ambient tree can be interpreted in $G$ , in the sense of first-order model theory.

Rooted monounary algebras can be considered as an algebraic counterpart of directed rooted trees. We work towards a characterization of the lattice of compatible quasiorders by describing its join- and meet-irreducible elements. We introduce the limit $\cB _\infty $ of all $d$-dimensional Boolean cubes $\Two ^d$ as a monounary algebra; then the natural order on $\Two ^d$ is meet-irreducible. Our main result is that any completely meet-irreducible quasiorder of a rooted algebra is a homomorphic preimage of the natural partial order (or its inverse) of a suitable subalgebra of $\cB _\infty $. For a partial order, it is known that complete meet-irreducibility means that the corresponding partially ordered structure is subdirectly irreducible. For a rooted monounary algebra it is shown that this property implies that the unary operation has finitely many nontrivial kernel classes and its graph is a binary tree.

We construct an associative product on the symmetric module S(L) of any pre-Lie algebra L. It turns S(L) into a Hopf algebra which is isomorphic to the enveloping algebra of LLie. Then we prove that in the case of rooted trees our construction gives the Grossman-Larson Hopf algebra, which is known to be the dual of the Connes-Kreimer Hopf algebra. We also show that symmetric brace algebras and pre-Lie algebras are the same. Finally, we give a similar interpretation of the Hopf algebra of planar rooted trees.

When a random electrical network has the structure of a rooted tree and the edge resistances are either inverse Gaussian or reciprocal inverse Gaussian random variables then, subject to some restrictions, the overall resistance of the network is shown to follow a reciprocal inverse Gaussian distribution.