Related papers: Sturmian words and the Stern sequence
Let $w$ be a word in a free group. A few years ago, Magee and the first named author discovered that the stable commutator length (scl) of $w$, a well-known topological invariant, can also be defined in terms of certain Fourier coefficients…
The sequence of partial sums of Fibonacci numbers, beginning with $2$, $4$, $7$, $12$, $20$, $33,\dots$, has several combinatorial interpretations (OEIS A000071). For instance, the $n$-th term in this sequence is the number of length-$n$…
We study the binary Ehrenfeucht Mycielski sequence seeking a balance between the number of occurrences of different binary strings. There have been numerous attempts to prove the balance conjecture of the sequence, which roughly states that…
The combinatorics of RNA plays a central role in biology. Mathematical biologists have several commonly-used models for RNA: words in a fixed alphabet (representing the primary sequence of nucleotides) and plane trees (representing the…
We develop an algorithm which can learn from partially labeled and unsegmented sequential data. Most sequential loss functions, such as Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC), break down when many labels are missing. We address this…
The traditional Arrow--Sen Social Choice Theory $\bf{TSCT}$ is a mathematical theory built apparently on higher--order formal language. In this paper, we propose a reformulation and reclassification of the $\bf{TSCT}$ axioms in order to…
Quantifying the similarity between symbolic sequences is a traditional problem in Information Theory which requires comparing the frequencies of symbols in different sequences. In numerous modern applications, ranging from DNA over music to…
Let $w$ be a word in alphabet $\{x,D\}$ with $m$ $x$'s and $n$ $D$'s. Interpreting "$x$" as multiplication by $x$, and "$D$" as differentiation with respect to $x$, the identity $wf(x) = x^{m-n}\sum_k S_w(k) x^k D^k f(x)$, valid for any…
Vincular or dashed patterns resemble classical patterns except that some of the letters within an occurrence are required to be adjacent. We prove several infinite families of Wilf-equivalences for k-ary words involving vincular patterns…
Narayana numbers appear in many places in combinatorics and probability, and it is known that they are asymptotically normal. Using Stein's method of exchangeable pairs, we provide an error of approximation in total variation to a symmetric…
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…
We obtain a Stein characterisation of the distribution of the product of two correlated normal random variables with non-zero means, and more generally the distribution of the sum of independent copies of such random variables. Our Stein…
We introduce the notion of unavoidable (complete) sets of word patterns, which is a refinement for that of words, and study certain numerical characteristics for unavoidable sets of patterns. In some cases we employ the graph of pattern…
In natural speech, the speaker does not pause between words, yet a human listener somehow perceives this continuous stream of phonemes as a series of distinct words. The detection of boundaries between spoken words is an instance of a…
Given a set $F$ of words, one associates to each word $w$ in $F$ an undirected graph, called its extension graph, and which describes the possible extensions of $w$ on the left and on the right. We investigate the family of sets of words…
We introduce a generalization of Smirnov words in the context of labeled binary trees, which we call Smirnov trees. We study the generating function for ascent-descent statistics on Smirnov trees and establish that it is $e$-positive, which…
String attractors are a combinatorial tool coming from the field of data compression. It is a set of positions within a word which intersects an occurrence of every factor. While one-sided infinite words admitting a finite string attractor…
We exhibit a recurrence on the number of discrete line segments joining two integer points in the plane using an encoding of such segments as balanced words of given length and height over the two-letter alphabet $\{0,1\}$. We give…
An integer sequence is said to be 3-free if no three elements form an arithmetic progression. Following the greedy algorithm, the Stanley sequence $S(a_0,a_1,\ldots,a_k)$ is defined to be the 3-free sequence $\{a_n\}$ having initial terms…
We introduce and study a complexity function on words $c_x(n),$ called \emph{cyclic complexity}, which counts the number of conjugacy classes of factors of length $n$ of an infinite word $x.$ We extend the well-known Morse-Hedlund theorem…