Topdrim partner Christian Reidys from the University of Southern Denmark will give a course on Topology and Combinatorics of RNA structures at the Excellence Course within the Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics at Politecnico di Torino. The course will run from the 5th of May to the 27th of May.

This course first introduces basic topology, quotient spaces and polygonal regions. It then passes to the classification theorem of topological surfaces and introduces the notion of cell-complex. Next we introduce fatgraphs as cell complexes and unicellular maps. Thereafter we show how RNA structures fit into the picture. Then we discuss genus induction and its combinatorial corollaries. The course then analyses shape polynomials and application to RNA folding and the uniform generation of RNA structures of fixed topological genus.