Related papers: Van der Waerden's Theorem and Avoidability in Word…
A non-empty word $w$ is a \emph{border} of a word $u$ if $\vert w\vert<\vert u\vert$ and $w$ is both a prefix and a suffix of $u$. A word $u$ is \emph{privileged} if $\vert u\vert\leq 1$ or if $u$ has a privileged border $w$ that appears…
In 1999 Lyngs{\o} and Pedersen proposed a conjecture stating that every binary circular word of length $n$ with equal number of zeros and ones has an antipalindromic linear subsequence of length at least $\frac{2}{3}n$. No progress over a…
Vaughan Pratt has introduced objects consisting of pairs $(A,W)$ where $A$ is a set and $W$ a set of subsets of $A,$ such that (i) $W$ contains $\emptyset$ and $A,$ (ii) if $C$ is a subset of $A\times A$ such that for every $a\in A,$ both…
A word is square-free if it does not contain nonempty factors of the form $XX$. In 1906 Thue proved that there exist arbitrarily long square-free words over a $3$-letter alphabet. It was proved recently [7] that among these words there are…
A $\textit{ladder}$ is a set $S \subseteq \mathbb Z^+$ such that any finite coloring of $\mathbb Z$ contains arbitrarily long monochromatic progressions with common difference in $S$. Van der Waerden's theorem famously asserts that $\mathbb…
An S-adic expansion of an infinite word is a way of writing it as the limit of an infinite product of substitutions (i.e., morphisms of a free monoid). Such a description is related to continued fraction expansions of numbers and vectors. A…
We discuss the notion of privileged word, recently introduced by Peltomaki. A word w is privileged if it is of length <=1, or has a privileged border that occurs exactly twice in w. We prove the following results: (1) if w^k is privileged…
The following special case of a conjecture by Loehr and Warrington was proved recently by Ekhad, Vatter, and Zeilberger: There are 10^n zero-sum words of length 5n in the alphabet {+3,-2} such that no zero-sum consecutive subword that…
In 1976, Dekking showed that there exists an infinite binary word that contains neither squares yy with y >= 4 nor cubes xxx. We show that `cube' can be replaced by any fractional power > 5/2. We also consider the analogous problem where…
The block reversal of a word $w$, denoted by $\mathtt{BR}(w)$, is a generalization of the concept of the reversal of a word, obtained by concatenating the blocks of the word in the reverse order. We characterize non-binary and binary words…
A conjecture of Rosenberger says that a group of the form $\langle x,y|x^p=y^q=W(x,y)^r=1\rangle$ (with $r>1$) is either virtually solvable or contains a non-abelian free subgroup. This note is an account of an attack on the conjecture in…
In this article, we investigate polynomial generalizations of the van der Waerden theorem with a focus on largeness properties of recurrence patterns. We prove an $IP_r^\star$-strengthened version of the polynomial van der Waerden theorem,…
We prove the following results: (1) There is a one-relator inverse monoid $\mathrm{Inv}\langle A\:|\:w=1 \rangle$ with undecidable word problem; and (2) There are one-relator groups with undecidable submonoid membership problem. The first…
We show that the number of length-n words over a k-letter alphabet having no even palindromic prefix is the same as the number of length-n unbordered words, by constructing an explicit bijection between the two sets. A slightly different…
Let S be a finite set of words over an alphabet Sigma. The set S is said to be complete if every word w over the alphabet Sigma is a factor of some element of S*, i.e. w belongs to Fact(S*). Otherwise if S is not complete, we are interested…
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…
Waring's classical problem deals with expressing every natural number as a sum of g(k) k-th powers. Recently there has been considerable interest in similar questions for nonabelian groups, and simple groups in particular. Here the k-th…
In this paper, we study a series of algorithmic problems related to the subsequences occurring in the strings of a given language, under the assumption that this language is succinctly represented by a grammar generating it, or an automaton…
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…
We study word reconstruction problems. Improving a previous result by P. Fleischmann, M. Lejeune, F. Manea, D. Nowotka and M. Rigo, we prove that, for any unknown word $w$ of length $n$ over an alphabet of cardinality $k$, $w$ can be…