Related papers: Infinite words containing squares at every positio…
A universal word for a finite alphabet $A$ and some integer $n\geq 1$ is a word over $A$ such that every word in $A^n$ appears exactly once as a subword (cyclically or linearly). It is well-known and easy to prove that universal words exist…
A word is "crucial" with respect to a given set of "prohibited words" (or simply "prohibitions") if it avoids the prohibitions but it cannot be extended to the right by any letter of its alphabet without creating a prohibition. A "minimal…
In 1982, Seebold showed that the only overlap-free binary words that are the fixed points of non-identity morphisms are the Thue-Morse word and its complement. We strengthen Seebold's result by showing that the same result holds if the term…
We completely characterize the words that can be avoided in infinite squarefree ternary words.
In this paper, we study partitions of totally positive integral elements $\alpha$ in a real quadratic field $K$. We prove that for a fixed integer $m \geq 1$, an element with $m$ partition exists in almost all $K$. We also obtain an upper…
We settle an open problem regarding palindromes; that is, positive integers which are the same when written forwards and backwards. In particular, we prove that for any fixed base $b\geq 2$, there exist infinitely many square-free…
We prove a Fife-like characterization of the infinite binary (7/3)-power-free words, by giving a finite automaton of 15 states that encodes all such words. As a consequence, we characterize all such words that are 2-automatic.
The set of all avoidable patterns in n or fewer letters can be avoided on an alphabet with 2(n+2) letters.
A word is called closed if it has a prefix which is also its suffix and there is no internal occurrences of this prefix in the word. In this paper we study words that are rich in closed factors, i.e., which contain the maximal possible…
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 study words that barely avoid repetitions, for several senses of "barely". A squarefree (respectively, overlap-free, cubefree) word is irreducible if removing any one of its interior letters creates a square (respectively, overlap,…
A \emph{tangram} is a word in which every letter occurs an even number of times. Such word can be cut into parts that can be arranged into two identical words. The minimum number of cuts needed is called the \emph{cut number} of a tangram.…
Let $\alpha\in \mathbb{R}\setminus\mathbb{Q}$ and $\beta\in \mathbb{R}$ be given. Suppose that $a_1,\ldots,a_s$ are distinct positive integers that do not contain a reduced residue system modulo $p^2$ for any prime $p$. We prove that there…
A binary shuffle square is a binary word of even length that can be partitioned into two disjoint, identical subwords. Huang, Nam, Thaper, and the first author conjectured that as $n\rightarrow \infty$, asymptotically half of all binary…
We investigate the scattered palindromic subwords in a finite word. We start by characterizing the words with the least number of scattered palindromic subwords. Then, we give an upper bound for the total number of palindromic subwords in a…
We give an upper bound for the norm of the determinant of additively indecomposable, totally positive definite quadratic forms defined over the ring of integers of totally real number fields. We apply these results to find lower and upper…
We construct an infinite binary word with critical exponent 3 that avoids abelian 4-powers. Our method gives an algorithm to determine if certain types of morphic sequences avoid additive powers. We also show that there are…
In this paper we answer two recent questions from Charlier et al. and Harju about self-shuffling words. An infinite word $w$ is called self-shuffling, if $w=\prod_{i=0}^\infty U_iV_i=\prod_{i=0}^\infty U_i=\prod_{i=0}^\infty V_i$ for some…
In the present paper we prove that for any fixed $1<c<7/6$ there exist infinitely many consecutive square-free numbers of the form $[n^c], [n^c]+1$ and we also establish an asymptotic formula in given interval.
In 2008, Kurosaki gave a new construction of a (bi-)infinite squarefree word over three letters. We show that in fact Kurosaki's word avoids 7/4+-powers, which, as shown by Dejean, is optimal over a 3-letter alphabet.