4-tangrams are 4-avoidable
Combinatorics
2025-07-16 v3 Discrete Mathematics
Abstract
A tangram is a word in which every letter occurs an even number of times. Thus it can be cut into parts that can be arranged into two identical words. The \emph{cut number} of a tangram is the minimum number of required cuts in this process. Tangrams with cut number one corresponds to squares. For , let denote the minimum size of an alphabet over which an infinite word avoids tangrams with cut number at most~. The existence of infinite ternary square-free words shows that . We show that , answering a question from D\k{e}bski, Grytczuk, Pawlik, Przyby\l{}o, and \'Sleszy\'nska-Nowak.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2502.20774,
title = {4-tangrams are 4-avoidable},
author = {Pascal Ochem and Théo Pierron},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.20774},
year = {2025}
}