A formalism for the analysis of DNA-sequences is presented. It develops the concept of a composition vector potential which incorporates intrinsic double-strand and four-base symmetries. The vector potential allows for straightforward coarse graining and graphical representation of whole...

The idea of measuring distance between languages seems to have its roots in the work of the French explorer Dumont D’Urville (1832) [13]. He collected comparative word lists for various languages during his voyages aboard the Astrolabe from 1826 to 1829 and, in his work concerning the...

In Ref. [13], Petroni and Serva discuss the use of Levenshtein distances (LD) between words referring to the same concepts as a tool for establishing overall distances among languages which can then subsequently be used to derive phylogenies. The authors modify the raw LD by dividing the LD by...