Related papers: On Non-Complete Sets and Restivo's Conjecture
A word $w$ is called a reaching word of a subset $S$ of states in a deterministic finite automaton (DFA) if $S$ is the image of $Q$ under the action of $w$. A DFA is called completely reachable if every non-empty subset of the state set has…
What sets A \subset Z^n can be written in the form (K-K) \cap Z^n, where K is a compact subset of R^n such that K+Z^n=R^n? Such sets A are called achievable, and it is known that if A is achievable, then < A >=Z^n. This condition completely…
Given a right-infinite word $\bf x$ over a finite alphabet $A$, the rank of $\bf x$ is the size of the smallest set $S$ of words over $A$ such that $\bf x$ can be realized as an infinite concatenation of words in $S$. We show that the…
For a word $S$, let $f(S)$ be the largest integer $m$ such that there are two disjoints identical (scattered) subwords of length $m$. Let $f(n, \Sigma) = \min \{f(S): S \text{is of length} n, \text{over alphabet} \Sigma \}$. Here, it is…
Let $\mathcal{S}$ be a commutative semigroup, and let $T$ be a sequence of terms from the semigroup $\mathcal{S}$. We call $T$ an (additively) {\sl irreducible} sequence provided that no sum of its some terms vanishes. Given any element $a$…
An $(n,k)$ sequence covering array is a set of permutations of $[n]$ such that each sequence of $k$ distinct elements of $[n]$ is a subsequence of at least one of the permutations. An $(n,k)$ sequence covering array is perfect if there is a…
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 suffixient set is a novel combinatorial object that captures the essential information of repetitive strings in a way that, provided with a random access mechanism, supports various forms of pattern matching. In this paper, we study the…
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…
The (bitwise) complement $\overline{x}$ of a binary word $x$ is obtained by changing each $0$ in $x$ to $1$ and vice versa. An $\textit{antisquare}$ is a nonempty word of the form $x\, \overline{x}$. In this paper, we study infinite binary…
A numerical semigroup is an additive subsemigroup of the natural numbers that contains zero and has finite complement. A numerical semigroup is irreducible if it cannot be written as an intersection of numerical semigroups properly…
Let $n,k,s$ be three integers and $\beta$ be a sufficiently small positive number such that $k\geq 3$, $0<1/n\ll \beta\ll 1/k$ and $ks+k\leq n\leq (1+\beta)ks+k-2$. A $k$-graph is called non-trivial if it has no isolated vertex. In this…
An automaton is unambiguous if for every input it has at most one accepting computation. An automaton is k-ambiguous (for k > 0) if for every input it has at most k accepting computations. An automaton is boundedly ambiguous if it is…
The set splittability problem is the following: given a finite collection of finite sets, does there exits a single set that contains exactly half the elements from each set in the collection? (If a set has odd size, we allow the floor or…
Superpermutations are words over a finite alphabet containing every permutation as a factor. Finding the minimal length of a superpermutation is still an open problem. In this article, we introduce superpermutations matrices. We establish a…
A set of sets is called a family. Two families $\mathcal{A}$ and $\mathcal{B}$ of sets are said to be cross-intersecting if each member of $\mathcal{A}$ intersects each member of $\mathcal{B}$. For any two integers $n$ and $k$ with $1 \leq…
A family of sets $\mathcal{A}$ is union-closed if it is finite and nonempty with member sets that are all finite and distinct (at least one of which is nonempty) and it satisfies the property $X, Y \in \mathcal{A} \implies X \cup Y \in…
Finite alphabets of at least three letters permit the construction of square-free words of infinite length. We show that the entropy density is strictly positive and derive reasonable lower and upper bounds. Finally, we present an…
An MSTD set is a finite set of integers with more sums than differences. It is proved that, for infinitely many positive integers $k$, there are infinitely many affinely inequivalent MSTD sets of cardinality $k$. There are several related…
It has been conjectured that if the number of distinct irreducible constituents of the product of two faithful irreducible characters of a finite $p$-group, for $p\geq5$, is bigger than $(p+1)/2$, then it is at least $p$. We give a…