Related papers: Van der Waerden's Theorem and Avoidability in Word…
We show that there exists an infinite word over the alphabet {0, 1, 3, 4} containing no three consecutive blocks of the same size and the same sum. This answers an open problem of Pirillo and Varricchio from 1994.
The additive square problem is a relatively famous open problem in the area of combinatorics on words: Does there exist an infinite word over a finite alphabet, such that no two consecutive blocks of the same length have the same sum? In…
We introduce the notion of unavoidable (complete) sets of word patterns, which is a refinement for that of words, and study certain numerical characteristics for unavoidable sets of patterns. In some cases we employ the graph of pattern…
A long standing question asks whether $\mathbb{Z}$ is uniformly 2-repetitive [Justin 1972, Pirillo and Varricchio, 1994], that is, whether there is an infinite sequence over a finite subset of $\mathbb{Z}$ avoiding two consecutive blocks of…
Let $n,m$ be positive integers and $c \in \mathbb{Z}_n$, where $\mathbb{Z}_n$ is the ring of integers modulo $n$. We almost complete providing the answer to the following problem, partially solved by N. Alon. Does any infinite sequence over…
In [X. Droubay et al, Episturmian words and some constructions of de Luca and Rauzy, Theoret. Comput. Sci. 255 (2001)], it was proved that every word w has at most |w|+1 many distinct palindromic factors, including the empty word. The…
The avoidability, or unavoidability of patterns in words over finite alphabets has been studied extensively. A word (pattern) over a finite set is said to be unavoidable if, for all but finitely many words, there exists a morphism mapping…
The relationship between the length of a word and the maximum length of its unbordered factors is investigated in this paper. Consider a finite word w of length n. We call a word bordered, if it has a proper prefix which is also a suffix of…
The notion of Abelian complexity of infinite words was recently used by the three last authors to investigate various Abelian properties of words. In particular, using van der Waerden's theorem, they proved that if a word avoids Abelian…
In this note we provide a (decidable) graph-structural characterisation of the infiniteness of $L(w_1, ..., w_k)$, where $L(w_1, ..., w_k) = \{w \in A^* | |w|_{w_1} = \cdots = |w|_{w_k}\}$ is the set of all words that contain the same…
Partial words are sequences over a finite alphabet that may contain wildcard symbols, called holes, which match or are compatible with all letters; partial words without holes are said to be full words (or simply words). Given an infinite…
For a given length and a given degree and an arbitrary partition of the positive integers, there always is a cell containing a polynomial progression of that length and that degree; moreover, the coefficients of the generating polynomial…
We give a new proof that there are infinitely many primes, relying on van der Waerden's theorem for coloring the integers, and Fermat's theorem that there cannot be four squares in an arithmetic progression. We go on to discuss where else…
A set X of partial words over a finite alphabet A is called unavoidable if every two-sided infinite word over A has a factor compatible with an element of X. Unlike the case of a set of words without holes, the problem of deciding whether…
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…
The famous van der Waerden theorem states that if partition N into finitely many cells then one of them will contain arbitrary length arithmetic progressions. It has a polynomial version also. In this article we will prove the near 0…
We present an impossibility result, called a theorem about facts and words, which pertains to a general communication system. The theorem states that the number of distinct words used in a finite text is roughly greater than the number of…
How long can a word be that avoids the unavoidable? Word $W$ encounters word $V$ provided there is a homomorphism $\phi$ defined by mapping letters to nonempty words such that $\phi(V)$ is a subword of $W$. Otherwise, $W$ is said to avoid…
We present results on the existence of long arithmetic progressions in the Thue-Morse word and in a class of generalised Thue-Morse words. Our arguments are inspired by van der Waerden's proof for the existence of arbitrary long…
Here we answer a conjecture by Ron Graham about getting finer upper bounds for van der Waerden numbers in the affirmative, but without the application of double induction or combinatorics as applied to sets of integers that contain some van…