Related papers: How many double squares can a string contain?
We demonstrate that there are infinitely many integers that cannot be expressed as the sum of two squares of integers and up to two non-negative integer powers of 2.
A shuffle of two strings is formed by interleaving the characters into a new string, keeping the characters of each string in order. A string is a square if it is a shuffle of two identical strings. There is a known polynomial time dynamic…
Given a finite grid in $\mathbb{R}^2$, how many lines are needed to cover all but one point at least $k$ times? Problems of this nature have been studied for decades, with a general lower bound having been established by Ball and Serra. We…
The following question was raised by Tuza in 1990 and Erdos et al. in 1992: if every edge of an n-vertex chordal graph G is contained in a clique of size at least four, does G have a clique transversal, i.e., a set of vertices meeting all…
We prove that every concatenation of $10$ or more binary squares contains an overlap. The bound $10$ is best possible. In contrast, over a ternary alphabet, there are infinitely long overlap-free words that consist of a concatenation of…
For an undirected tree with $n$ edges labelled by single letters, we consider its substrings, which are labels of the simple paths between pairs of nodes. We prove that there are $O(n^{1.5})$ different palindromic substrings. This solves an…
A binary shuffle square is a binary word of even length that can be partitioned into two disjoint, identical subwords. Huang, Nam, Thaper, and the first author conjectured that as $n\rightarrow \infty$, asymptotically half of all binary…
Let $T(n)$ denote the maximal number of transversals in an order-$n$ Latin square. Improving on the bounds obtained by McKay et al., Taranenko recently proved that $T(n) \leq \left((1+o(1))\frac{n}{e^2}\right)^{n}$, and conjectured that…
A well known upper bound for the spectral radius of a graph, due to Hong, is that $\mu_1^2 \le 2m - n + 1$. It is conjectured that for connected graphs $n - 1 \le s^+ \le 2m - n + 1$, where $s^+$ denotes the sum of the squares of the…
Given any convex $n$-gon, in this article, we: (i) prove that its vertices can form at most $n^2/2 + \Theta(n\log n)$ isosceles trianges with two sides of unit length and show that this bound is optimal in the first order, (ii) conjecture…
The discrepancy of a binary string refers to the maximum (absolute) difference between the number of ones and the number of zeroes over all possible substrings of the given binary string. We provide an investigation of the discrepancy of…
This paper studies the following question: Given a surface $\Sigma$ and an integer $n$, what is the maximum number of cliques in an $n$-vertex graph embeddable in $\Sigma$? We characterise the extremal graphs for this question, and prove…
A $d$-regular graph on $n$ nodes has at most $T_{\max} = \frac{n}{3} \tbinom{d}{2}$ triangles. We compute the leading asymptotics of the probability that a large random $d$-regular graph has at least $c \cdot T_{\max}$ triangles, and…
We show that the number of lines contained in a supersingular quartic surface is 40 or at most 32, if the characteristic of the field equals 2, and it is 112, 58, or at most 52, if the characteristic equals 3. If the quartic is not…
We establish that almost every positive integer $n$ is the sum of four cubes, two of which are at most $n^{\theta}$, as long as $\theta\geq192/869$. An asymptotic formula for the number of such representations is established when…
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…
Let $Q_n$ be the $n$-dimensional Hamming cube and $N=2^n$. We prove that the number of maximal independent sets in $Q_n$ is asymptotically \[2n2^{N/4},\] as was conjectured by Ilinca and the first author in connection with a question of…
This paper is concerned with the problem of finding $n$ distinct squares such that, on excluding any one of them, the sum of the remaining $n-1$ squares is a square. While parametric solutions are known when $n=3$ and $n=4$, when $n > 4$,…
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…
It is shown that the maximum number of patterns that can occur in a permutation of length $n$ is asymptotically $2^n$. This significantly improves a previous result of Coleman.