Related papers: An Improved Lower Bound for $n$-Brinkhuis $k$-Trip…

John Tromp introduced the so-called 'binary lambda calculus' as a way to encode lambda terms in terms of 0-1-strings using the de Bruijn representation along with a weighting scheme. Later, Grygiel and Lescanne conjectured that the number…

In combinatorics on words, a word $w$ over an alphabet $\Sigma$ is said to avoid a pattern $p$ over an alphabet $\Delta$ if there is no factor $f$ of $w$ such that $f=h(p)$ where $h:\Delta^*\to\Sigma^*$ is a non-erasing morphism. A pattern…

A tangram is a word in which every letter occurs an even number of times. Thus it can be cut into parts that can be arranged into two identical words. The \emph{cut number} of a tangram is the minimum number of required cuts in this…

Let $\theta(n)$ denote the number of permutations of $\{1,2,\ldots,n\}$ that do not contain a 3-term arithmetic progression as a subsequence. Such permutations are known as 3-free permutations. We present a dynamic programming algorithm to…

It is known that the size of the largest common subtree (i.e., the maximum agreement subtree) of two independent random binary trees with $n$ given labeled leaves is of order between $n^{0.366}$ and $n^{1/2}$. We improve the lower bound to…

We study the growth rate of some power-free languages. For any integer $k$ and real $\beta>1$, we let $\alpha(k,\beta)$ be the growth rate of the number of $\beta$-free words of a given length over the alphabet $\{1,2,\ldots, k\}$. Shur…

We study the quantum query complexity of two problems. First, we consider the problem of determining if a sequence of parentheses is a properly balanced one (a Dyck word), with a depth of at most $k$. We call this the $Dyck_{k,n}$ problem.…

We prove that for every integer $n > 0$ and for every alphabet $\Sigma_k$ of size $k \geq 3$, there exists a necklace of length $n$ whose Burrows-Wheeler Transform (BWT) is completely unclustered, i.e., it consists of exactly $n$ runs with…

Entringer, Jackson, and Schatz conjectured in 1974 that every infinite cubefree binary word contains arbitrarily long squares. In this paper we show this conjecture is false: there exist infinite cubefree binary words avoiding all squares…

Notice that the square of $9376$ is $87909376$ which has as its rightmost four digits $9376$. To generalize this remarkable fact, we show that, for each integer $n\ge 2$, there exists at least one and at most two positive integers $x$ with…

We characterize exactly the lengths of binary circular words containing no squares other than 00, 11, and 0101. Key words: combinatorics on words, circular words, necklaces, square-free words, non-repetitive sequences

The ternary Goldbach conjecture, or three-primes problem, states that every odd number $n$ greater than $5$ can be written as the sum of three primes. The conjecture, posed in 1742, remained unsolved until now, in spite of great progress in…

Shallit and Wang studied deterministic automatic complexity of words. They showed that the automatic Hausdorff dimension $I(\mathbf t)$ of the infinite Thue word satisfies $1/3\le I(\mathbf t)\le 2/3$. We improve that result by showing that…

In this paper, we study arbitrary subword-closed languages over the alphabet $\{0,1\}$ (binary subword-closed languages). For the set of words $L(n)$ of the length $n$ belonging to a binary subword-closed language $L$, we investigate the…

A circular word, or a necklace, is an equivalence class under conjugation of a word. A fundamental question concerning regularities in standard words is bounding the number of distinct squares in a word of length $n$. The famous conjecture…

Motivated by applications to matrix multiplication algorithms, Pratt asked (ITCS'24) how large a subset of $[n] \times [n]$ could be without containing a skew-corner: three points $(x,y), (x,y+h),(x+h,y')$ with $h \ne 0$. We prove any skew…

We show that the maximum number of triples on $n$~points, if no three triples span at most five points, is $(1\pm o(1))n^2/5$. More generally, let $f^{(r)}(n;k,s)$ be the maximum number of edges of an $r$-uniform hypergraph on $n$~vertices…

A \emph{tangram} is a word in which every letter occurs an even number of times. Such word can be cut into parts that can be arranged into two identical words. The minimum number of cuts needed is called the \emph{cut number} of a tangram.…

The \textit{ternary digits of $2^n$} are a finite sequence of 0s, 1s, and 2s. It is a natural question to ask whether the frequency of any string of 0s, 1s, and 2s in this sequence approaches the same limit for all strings of the same…

It is well known that $n/(n - \mu)$, where $\mu$ is the spectral radius of a graph with $n$ vertices, is a lower bound for the clique number. We conjecture that $\mu$ can be replaced in this bound with $\sqrt{s^+}$, where $s^+$ is the sum…