Related papers: Avoiding Three Consecutive Blocks of the Same Size…
We study a question of Harju from 2019 regarding the existence of infinite ternary square-free words whose subsequences modulo $p$ and $q$ are also square-free for relatively prime integers $p$ and $q$. Among such pairs $(p, q)$ with $p, q…
We implement a decision procedure for answering questions about a class of infinite words that might be called (for lack of a better name) "Fibonacci-automatic". This class includes, for example, the famous Fibonacci word f = 01001010...,…
Covering arrays for words of length $t$ over a $d$ letter alphabet are $k \times n$ arrays with entries from the alphabet so that for each choice of $t$ columns, each of the $d^t$ $t$-letter words appears at least once among the rows of the…
The comma sequence (1, 12, 35, 94, ...) is the lexicographically earliest sequence such that the difference of consecutive terms equals the concatenation of the digits on either side of the comma separating them. The behavior of a…
The palindromic length of the finite word $v$ is equal to the minimal number of palindromes whose concatenation is equal to $v$. It was conjectured in 2013 that for every infinite aperiodic word $x$, the palindromic length of its factors is…
This note concerns the non-existence of three consecutive powerful numbers. We use Pell equations, elliptic curves, and second-order recurrences to show that there are no such triplets with the middle term a perfect cube and each of the…
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…
We show the existence of a constant $c > 0$ such that, for all positive integers $n$, there exist integers $1 \leq a_1 < \ldots < a_k \leq n$ such that there are at least $cn^2$ distinct integers of the form $\sum_{i=u}^{v}a_i$ with $1 \leq…
A {\em square} is a word of the form $uu$. In this paper we prove that for a given finite word $w$, the number of distinct square factors of $w$ is bounded by $|w|-|\Alphabet(w)|+1$, where $|w|$ denotes the length of $w$ and…
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 word of length $n$ is rich if it contains $n$ nonempty palindromic factors. An infinite word is rich if all of its finite factors are rich. Baranwal and Shallit produced an infinite binary rich word with critical exponent $2+\sqrt{2}/2$…
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,…
Brandenburg and (implicitly) Dejean introduced the concept of repetition threshold: the smallest real number alpha such that there exists an infinite word over a k-letter alphabet that avoids beta-powers for all beta>alpha. We generalize…
This paper is a continuation of a previous paper. Here, as there, we examine the problem of finding the maximum number of terms in a partial sequence of distinct unit fractions larger than 1/100 that sums to 1. In the previous paper, we…
We extract brilliant ideas of Sandi Klavzar, Michel Mollard, and Marko Petkovsek who used them to solve one very specific enumeration problem, namely counting the number of words in the alphabet {0,1} of length n avoiding two consecutive…
It is known that the number of overlap-free binary words of length n grows polynomially, while the number of cubefree binary words grows exponentially. We show that the dividing line between polynomial and exponential growth is 7/3. More…
In 2017, Vesti proposed the problem of determining the repetition threshold for infinite rich words, i.e., for infinite words in which all factors of length $n$ contain $n$ distinct nonempty palindromic factors. In 2020, Currie, Mol, and…
Fici, Restivo, Silva, and Zamboni define a $\textit{$k$-anti-power}$ to be a concatenation of $k$ consecutive words that are pairwise distinct and have the same length. They ask for the maximum $k$ such that every aperiodic recurrent word…
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…
In this paper, we consider pattern avoidance in a subset of words on $\{1,1,2,2,\dots,n,n\}$ called reverse double lists. In particular a reverse double list is a word formed by concatenating a permutation with its reversal. We enumerate…