Related papers: Palindromic Richness
A word $w$ is called rich if it contains $| w|+1$ palindromic factors, including the empty word. We say that a rich word $w$ can be extended in at least two ways if there are two distinct letters $x,y$ such that $wx,wy$ are rich. Let $R$…
Trapezoidal words are words having at most $n+1$ distinct factors of length $n$ for every $n\ge 0$. They therefore encompass finite Sturmian words. We give combinatorial characterizations of trapezoidal words and exhibit a formula for their…
A finite word $w$ with $\vert w\vert=n$ contains at most $n+1$ distinct palindromic factors. If the bound $n+1$ is attained, the word $w$ is called \emph{rich}. Let $\Factor(w)$ be the set of factors of the word $w$. It is known that there…
We study infinite binary words that contain few distinct palindromes. In particular, we classify such words according to their critical exponents. This extends results by Fici and Zamboni [TCS 2013]. Interestingly, the words with 18 and 20…
We investigate the least number of palindromic factors in an infinite word. We first consider general alphabets, and give answers to this problem for periodic and non-periodic words, closed or not under reversal of factors. We then…
We consider questions related to the structure of infinite words (over an integer alphabet) with bounded additive complexity, i.e., words with the property that the number of distinct sums exhibited by factors of the same length is bounded…
Two words are $k$-binomially equivalent if each subword of length at most $k$ occurs the same number of times in both words. The $k$-binomial complexity of an infinite word is a counting function that maps $n$ to the number of $k$-binomial…
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…
We show that there exists an uniformly recurrent infinite word whose set of factors is closed under reversal and which has only finitely many palindromic factors.
Any finite word $w$ of length $n$ contains at most $n+1$ distinct palindromic factors. If the bound $n+1$ is reached, the word $w$ is called rich. The number of rich words of length $n$ over an alphabet of cardinality $q$ is denoted…
The present paper records more details of the relationship between primitive elements and palindromes in F_2, the free group of rank two. We characterise the conjugacy classes of primitive elements which contain palindromes as those which…
It is well known that Sturmian sequences are the aperiodic sequences that are balanced over a 2-letter alphabet. They are also characterized by their complexity: they have exactly $(n+1)$ factors of length $n$. One possible generalization…
These lecture notes provide an introduction to combinatorics on words and its interactions with dynamics, algebra, and arithmetic. The central theme is the notion of low factor complexity for infinite words. We investigate the following…
Sturmian words form a family of one-sided infinite words over a binary alphabet that are obtained as a discretization of a line with an irrational slope starting from the origin. A finite version of this class of words called Christoffel…
First introduced in the study of the Sturmian words, the iterated palindromic closure was recently generalized to pseudopalindromes. This operator allows one to construct words with an infinity of pseudopalindromic prefixes, called…
Sturmian sequences are well-known as the ones having minimal complexity over a 2-letter alphabet. They are also the balanced sequences over a 2-letter alphabet and the sequences describing discrete lines. They are famous and have been…
We prove that the property of being closed (resp., palindromic, rich, privileged trapezoidal, balanced) is expressible in first-order logic for automatic (and some related) sequences. It therefore follows that the characteristic function of…
The Fibonacci word $W$ on an infinite alphabet was introduced in [Zhang et al., Electronic J. Combinatorics 2017 24(2), 2-52] as a fixed point of the morphism $2i\rightarrow (2i)(2i+1)$, $(2i+1) \rightarrow (2i+2)$, $i\geq 0$. Here, for any…
In this book chapter, written in French, we consider the classical family of Sturmian words, defined as the aperiodic infinite words containing only $n+1$ factors of a length $n$, which is the minimal possible value. We will discuss several…
A balanced word is one in which any two factors of the same length contain the same number of each letter of the alphabet up to one. Finite binary balanced words are called Sturmian words. A Sturmian word is bispecial if it can be extended…