Related papers: Beyond the Runs Theorem

Tandem duplication in DNA is the process of inserting a copy of a segment of DNA adjacent to the original position. Motivated by applications that store data in living organisms, Jain {\em et al.} (2016) proposed the study of codes that…

We introduce an elementary congruence-based procedure to look for q-th power multiples in arbitrary binary recurrence sequences (q>2). The procedure allows to prove that no such multiples exist in many instances.

Let $a,b$ and $n$ be positive integers with $a>b$. In this note, we prove that $$(2bn+1)(2bn+3){2bn \choose bn}\bigg|3(a-b)(3a-b){2an \choose an}{an\choose bn}.$$ This confirms a recent conjecture of Amdeberhan and Moll.

Let $T_n$ denote the binary tree of depth $n$ augmented by an extra edge connected to its root. Let $C_n$ denote the cover time of $T_n$ by simple random walk. We prove that $\sqrt{ \mathcal{C}_{n} 2^{-(n+1) } } - m_n$ converges in…

In this short note, we show a simple characterization of integers that reach records for a sequence described by adding binary strings to runs of 1's and 0's in a binary representation. In particular, we show that this set does not depend…

We show that the number of $1$'s in the first $N$ digits of the binary expansion of $\sqrt{2}$ is at least $\sqrt{2N}(1+o(1))$ and show that this bound can be improved to around $2\sqrt{N}/\sqrt{2\sqrt{2}-1}$ infinitely often.

A word is level if each letter appears in it the same number of times, plus or minus 1. We give a complete characterization of the lengths for which level ternary circular square-free words exist. Key words: combinatorics on words, circular…

Given $r\geq 3$ and $2^{r-1}+1\leq n< 2^{r}-1$, an $[n,n-r,3]$ shortened Hamming code that can detect a maximal number of double errors is constructed. The optimality of the construction is proven.

The classical No-Three-In-Line problem seeks the maximum number of points that may be selected from an $n\times n$ grid while avoiding a collinear triple. The maximum is well known to be linear in $n$. Following a question of Erde, we seek…

We present a novel conjecture concerning the additive representation of natural numbers using prime powers. Based on extensive computational verification, we conjecture that every integer n > 23 can be expressed as a sum of at most five…

We prove an explicit formula to count the partitions of $n$ whose product of the summands is at most $n$. In the process, we also deduce a result to count the multiplicative partitions of $n$.

We consider decompositions of the real line into pairwise disjoint Borel pieces so that each piece is closed under addition. How many pieces can there be? We prove among others that the number of pieces is either at most 3 or uncountable,…

We study the number of linear extensions of a partial order with a given proportion of comparable pairs of elements, and estimate the maximum and minimum possible numbers. We also consider a random interval partial order on $n$ elements,…

A de Bruijn covering code is a q-ary string S so that every q-ary string is at most R symbol changes from some n-word appearing consecutively in S. We introduce these codes and prove that they can have length close to the smallest possible…

In this paper we propose an algorithm to generate binary words with no more 0's than 1's having a fixed number of 1's and avoiding the pattern $(10)^j1$ for any fixed $j \geq 1$. We will prove that this generation is exhaustive, that is,…

A string $w$ is said to be a minimal unique substring (MUS) of a string $T$ if $w$ occurs exactly once in $T$, and any proper substring of $w$ occurs at least twice in $T$. It is known that the number of MUSs in a string $T$ of length $n$…

Given an infinite linear group with a finite set of generators, we show that the shortest word length of an element of infinite order has an upper bound that depends only on the number of generators and the degree. This provides a…

We show that there is a bijection between real-linear automorphisms of the multicomplex numbers of order $n$ and signed permutations of length $2^{n-1}$. This allows us to deduce a number of results on the multicomplex numbers, including a…

In {\sc MaxSat}, we ask for an assignment which satisfies the maximum number of clauses for a boolean formula in CNF. We present an algorithm yielding a run time upper bound of $O^*(2^{\frac{1}{6.2158}})$ for {\sc Max-2-Sat} (each clause…

For given integers a,b, and j at least 1 we determine the set of integers n for which a^n-b^n is divisible by n^j. For j=1,2, this set is usually infinite; we find explicitly the exceptional cases for which a,b the set is finite. For j=2,…