Moduli of Curves II: I forgot my point!

Young tableaux are to planes as labeled trees are to curves. Continuing from the motivation of the previous post, we now dive into the structure of the moduli space $\overline{M}_{0,n}$, and construct two recursive structures that lead to beautiful inductive theory, and, in the next post, the construction of the space as a projective variety. Let’s start with a definition of the noncompact…