Shuffles of trees

Abstract

We discuss a notion of shuffle for trees which extends the usual notion of a shuffle for two natural numbers. We give several equivalent descriptions, and prove some algebraic and combinatorial properties. In addition, we characterize shuffles in terms of open sets in a topological space associated to a pair of trees. Our notion of shuffle is motivated by the theory of operads and occurs in the theory of dendroidal sets, but our presentation is independent and entirely self-contained.