Related papers: Avoiding Abelian powers in binary words with bound…

A celebrated theorem by Coven and Hedlund (1973) states that Sturmian words are characterized by their abelian complexity: they are precisely the infinite words with rationally independent letter frequencies and constant abelian complexity…

Return words constitute a powerful tool for studying symbolic dynamical systems. They may be regarded as a discrete analogue of the first return map in dynamical systems. In this paper we investigate two abelian variants of the notion of…

Two finite words $u,v$ are 2-binomially equivalent if, for all words $x$ of length at most 2, the number of occurrences of $x$ as a (scattered) subword of $u$ is equal to the number of occurrences of $x$ in $v$. This notion is a refinement…

In this paper, we study the relation between periodicity of two-dimensional words and their abelian pattern complexity. A pattern $\cal{P}$ in $\mathbb{Z}^n$ is the set of all translations of some finite subset $F$ of $\mathbb{Z}^n$. An…

We begin a systematic study of the relations between subword complexity of infinite words and their power avoidance. Among other things, we show that -- the Thue-Morse word has the minimum possible subword complexity over all overlap-free…

The recently confirmed Dejean's conjecture about the threshold between avoidable and unavoidable powers of words gave rise to interesting and challenging problems on the structure and growth of threshold words. Over any finite alphabet with…

Building an infinite square-free word by appending one letter at a time while simultaneously avoiding the creation of squares is most likely to fail. When the alphabet has two letters this approach is impossible. When the alphabet has three…

A word is said to be bordered if it contains a nonempty proper prefix that is also a suffix. A pair of words $(u, v)$ is said to be mutually bordered if there exists a word that is a nonempty proper prefix of $u$ and suffix of $v$, and…

Richomme, Saari and Zamboni (J. Lond. Math. Soc. 83: 79-95, 2011) proved that at every position of a Sturmian word starts an abelian power of exponent $k$ for every $k > 0$. We improve on this result by studying the maximum exponents of…

We say that an infinite word w is weak abelian periodic if it can be factorized into finite words with the same frequencies of letters. In the paper we study properties of weak abelian periodicity, its relations with balance and frequency.…

We show that paper folding words contain arbitrarily large abelian powers.

In combinatorics on words, a classical topic of study is the number of specific patterns appearing in infinite sequences. For instance, many works have been dedicated to studying the so-called factor complexity of infinite sequences, which…

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…

We study cube-free words over arbitrary non-unary finite alphabets and prove the following structural property: for every pair $(u,v)$ of $d$-ary cube-free words, if $u$ can be infinitely extended to the right and $v$ can be infinitely…

We study the following problem, first introduced by Dekking. Consider an infinite word x over an alphabet {0,1,...,k-1} and a semigroup homomorphism S:{0,1,...,k-1}* -> N. Let L_x denote the set of factors of x. What conditions on S and the…

This note is an attempt to attack a conjecture of Fraenkel and Simpson stated in 1998 concerning the number of distinct squares in a finite word. By counting the number of (right-)special factors, we give an upper bound of the number of…

Carpi constructed an infinite word over a 4-letter alphabet that avoids squares in all subsequences indexed by arithmetic progressions of odd difference. We show a connection between Carpi's construction and the paperfolding words. We…

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…

In combinatorics of words, a concatenation of $k$ consecutive equal blocks is called a power of order $k$. In this paper we take a different point of view and define an anti-power of order $k$ as a concatenation of $k$ consecutive pairwise…

The combinatorics of squares in a word depends on how the equivalence of halves of the square is defined. We consider Abelian squares, parameterized squares, and order-preserving squares. The word $uv$ is an Abelian (parameterized,…