English

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 k1k\ge1, let t(k)t(k) denote the minimum size of an alphabet over which an infinite word avoids tangrams with cut number at most~kk. The existence of infinite ternary square-free words shows that t(1)=t(2)=3t(1)=t(2)=3. We show that t(3)=t(4)=4t(3)=t(4)=4, 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}
}