text: 348,14,811039425123651586,460069521,Andrew Francis,"New paper out with @jezlurch and Peter Jarvis, using representation theory to calc inversion distance in bacteria! <LINK> Very nice to be able to use the group algebra in algebraic biology! And some irreducible characters, thanks to power work by @jezlurch",https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.06035,"In the context of bacteria and models of their evolution under genome rearrangement, we explore a novel application of group representation theory to the inference of evolutionary history. Our contribution is to show, in a very general maximum likelihood setting, how to use elementary matrix algebra to sidestep intractable combinatorial computations and convert the problem into one of eigenvalue estimation amenable to standard numerical approximation techniques. ","A representation-theoretic approach to the calculation of evolutionary