English

New examples of words for which binomial complexities and subword complexity coincide

Combinatorics 2026-03-02 v2

Abstract

The complexity of an infinite word can be measured in several ways, the two most common measures being the subword complexity and the abelian complexity. In 2015, Rigo and Salimov introduced a family of intermediate complexities indexed by kN>0k\in\mathbb{N}_{>0}: the kk-binomial complexities. These complexities scale up from the abelian complexity, with which the 11-binomial complexity coincides, to the subword complexity, to which they converge pointwise as kk tends to ++\infty. In this article, we provide four classes of dd-ary infinite words -- namely, dd-ary 11-balanced words, words with subword complexity nN>0n+(d1)n\in\mathbb{N}_{>0}\mapsto n+(d-1) (which form a subclass of the so-called quasi-Sturmian words), hypercubic billiard words, and words constructed by repeated Sturmian colorings -- for which this scale ``collapses'', that is, all kk-binomial complexities, for k2k\geq 2, coincide with the subword complexity. This work generalizes a result of Rigo and Salimov, established in their seminal paper from 2015, which asserts that the kk-binomial complexity of any Sturmian word coincides with its subword complexity whenever k2k\geq 2.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.11172,
  title  = {New examples of words for which binomial complexities and subword complexity coincide},
  author = {Léo Vivion},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.11172},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Minor revisions. A new subsection with examples clarifying the relations between the four classes of words in the main theorem has been added, and several typographical errors have been corrected. The main results remain unchanged

R2 v1 2026-07-01T05:35:18.488Z