Related papers: Repetition Avoidance in Circular Factors

We solve a problem of Petrova, finalizing the classification of letter patterns avoidable by ternary square-free words; we show that there is a ternary square-free word avoiding letter pattern $xyzxzyx$. In fact, we: (1) characterize all…

The observed frequency of the longest proper prefix, the longest proper suffix, and the longest infix of a word $w$ in a given sequence $x$ can be used for classifying $w$ as avoided or overabundant. The definitions used for the expectation…

A word is called $\beta$-free if it has no factors of exponent greater than or equal to $\beta$. The repetition threshold $\mathrm{RT}(k)$ is the infimum of the set of all $\beta$ such that there are arbitrarily long $k$-ary $\beta$-free…

We describe a new non-constructive technique to show that squares are avoidable by an infinite word even if we force some letters from the alphabet to appear at certain occurrences. We show that as long as forced positions are at distance…

We investigate the avoidability of unary patterns of size of four with morphic permutations. More precisely, we show that, for the positive integers $i,j,k$, the sizes of the alphabets over which a pattern $x \pi ^ {i} (x) \pi^{j}(x)…

We prove that if a uniformly recurrent infinite word contains as a factor any finite permutation of words from an infinite family, then either this word is periodic, or its complexity (that is, the number of factors) grows faster than…

A correlation is a binary vector that encodes all possible positions of overlaps of two words, where an overlap for an ordered pair of words (u,v) occurs if a suffix of word u matches a prefix of word v. As multiple pairs can have the same…

Permutations that avoid given patterns are among the most classical objects in combinatorics and have strong connections to many fields of mathematics, computer science and biology. In this paper we study fixed points of both 123- and…

In the first part of this survey, we present classical notions arising in combinatorics on words: growth function of a language, complexity function of an infinite word, pattern avoidance, periodicity and uniform recurrence. Our…

We present a family of avoidable formulas with reversal whose avoidability index is unbounded. We also complete the determination of the avoidability index of the formulas with reversal in the 3-avoidance basis.

We consider a random permutation drawn from the set of permutations of length $n$ that avoid some given set of patterns of length 3. We show that the number of occurrences of another pattern $\sigma$ has a limit distribution, after suitable…

Given a countable set X (usually taken to be the natural numbers or integers), an infinite permutation, \pi, of X is a linear ordering of X. This paper investigates the combinatorial complexity of infinite permutations on the natural…

A generic rectangulation is a partition of a rectangle into finitely many interior-disjoint rectangles, such that no four rectangles meet in a point. In this work we present a versatile algorithmic framework for exhaustively generating a…

In previous work, Currie and Rampersad showed that the growth of the number of binary words avoiding the pattern xxx^R was intermediate between polynomial and exponential. We now show that the same holds for the growth of the number of…

We consider the infinite one-sided sequence over alphabet $\{a,b\}$ generated by the period-doubling substitution $\sigma(a)=ab$ and $\sigma(b)=aa$, denoted by $\mathbb{D}$. Let $r_p(\omega)$ be the $p$-th return word of factor $\omega$.…

In this paper we prove that for any infinite word W whose set of factors is closed under reversal, the following conditions are equivalent: (I) all complete returns to palindromes are palindromes; (II) P(n) + P(n+1) = C(n+1) - C(n) + 2 for…

Given a word $w$, what is the maximum possible number of appearances of $w$ reading contiguously along any of the directions in $\{-1, 0, 1\}^d \setminus \{\mathbf{0}\}$ in a large $d$-dimensional grid (as in a word search)? Patchell and…

In this paper, we consider a variant of the classical algorithmic problem of checking whether a given word $v$ is a subsequence of another word $w$. More precisely, we consider the problem of deciding, given a number $p$ (defining a…

We complete the enumeration of cyclic permutations avoiding two patterns of length three each by providing explicit formulas for all but one of the pairs for which no such formulas were known. The pair $(123,231)$ proves to be the most…

We investigate pattern avoidance in alternating permutations and generalizations thereof. First, we study pattern avoidance in an alternating analogue of Young diagrams. In particular, we extend Babson-West's notion of shape-Wilf…