An invitation to trees of finite cone type: random and deterministic operators

Trees of finite cone type have appeared in various contexts. In particular, they come up as simplified models of regular tessellations of the hyperbolic plane. The spectral theory of the associated Laplacians can thus be seen as induced by geometry. Here we give an introduction focusing on background and then turn to recent results for (random) perturbations of trees of finite cone type and their spectral theory.