English

Van der Waerden's Theorem and Avoidability in Words

Combinatorics 2009-11-17 v5 Formal Languages and Automata Theory

Abstract

Pirillo and Varricchio, and independently, Halbeisen and Hungerbuhler considered the following problem, open since 1994: Does there exist an infinite word w over a finite subset of Z such that w contains no two consecutive blocks of the same length and sum? We consider some variations on this problem in the light of van der Waerden's theorem on arithmetic progressions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0812.2466,
  title  = {Van der Waerden's Theorem and Avoidability in Words},
  author = {Yu-Hin Au and Aaron Robertson and Jeffrey Shallit},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0812.2466},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

Co-author added; new results

R2 v1 2026-06-21T11:51:33.158Z