Related papers: Tower-type bounds for unavoidable patterns in word…
The problem of finding factors of a text string which are identical or similar to a given pattern string is a central problem in computer science. A generalised version of this problem consists in implementing an index over the text to…
We introduce a flexible class of well-quasi-orderings (WQOs) on words that generalizes the ordering of (not necessarily contiguous) subwords. Each such WQO induces a class of piecewise testable languages (PTLs) as Boolean combinations of…
Enumeration problems related to words avoiding patterns as well as permutations that contain the pattern $123$ exactly once have been studied in great detail. However, the problem of enumerating words that contain the pattern $123$ exactly…
A large family of words must contain two words that are similar. We investigate several problems where the measure of similarity is the length of a common subsequence. We construct a family of n^{1/3} permutations on n letters, such that…
A finite word $w$ is an abelian square if $w = xx^\prime$ with $x^\prime$ a permutation of $x$. In 1972, Entringer, Jackson, and Schatz proved that every binary word of length $k^2 + 6k$ contains an abelian square of length $\geq 2k$. We…
Frid, Puzynina and Zamboni (2013) defined the palindromic length of a finite word $w$ as the minimal number of palindromes whose concatenation is equal to $w$. For an infinite word $u$ we study $PL_{u}$, that is, the function that assigns…
We characterize the words that can be mapped to arbitrarily high powers by injective morphisms. For all other words, we prove a linear upper bound for the highest power that they can be mapped to, and this bound is optimal up to a constant…
We consider several novel aspects of unique factorization in formal languages. We reprove the familiar fact that the set uf(L) of words having unique factorization into elements of L is regular if L is regular, and from this deduce an…
Let $W$ denote the $n$-dimensional affine space over the finite field $\mathbb F_q$. We prove here a Bollob\'as-type upper bound in the case of the set of affine subspaces. We give a construction of a pair of families of affine subspaces,…
A morphic word is obtained by iterating a morphism to generate an infinite word, and then applying a coding. We characterize morphic words with polynomial growth in terms of a new type of infinite word called a $\textit{zigzag word}$. A…
An infinite permutation is a linear ordering of the set of non-negative integers. Generally, the properties of infinite permutations analogous to those of infinite words show some resemblances and some differences between permutations and…
The exponent of a word is the ratio of its length over its smallest period. The repetitive threshold r(a) of an a-letter alphabet is the smallest rational number for which there exists an infinite word whose finite factors have exponent at…
Patterns are words with terminals and variables. The language of a pattern is the set of words obtained by uniformly substituting all variables with words that contain only terminals. In their original definition, patterns only allow for…
We construct an infinite word $w$ over the $5$-letter alphabet such that for every factor $f$ of $w$ of length at least two, there exists a cyclic permutation of $f$ that is not a factor of $w$. In other words, $w$ does not contain a…
We study the relation between the palindromic and factor complexity of infinite words. We show that for uniformly recurrent words one has P(n)+P(n+1) \leq \Delta C(n) + 2, for all n \in N. For a large class of words it is a better estimate…
We consider words $w$ over the alphabet $\Sigma=\{0,1,2\}$. It is shown that there are irreducibly square-free words of all lengths $n$ except 4,5,7 and 12. Such a word is square-free (i.e., it has no repetitions $uu$ as factors), but by…
Words in some natural languages can have a composite structure. Elements of this structure include the root (that could also be composite), prefixes and suffixes with which various nuances and relations to other words can be expressed.…
According to the math tea argument, there must be real numbers that we cannot describe or define, because there are uncountably many real numbers, but only countably many definitions. And yet, the existence of pointwise-definable models of…
We study a question of Harju from 2019 regarding the existence of infinite ternary square-free words whose subsequences modulo $p$ and $q$ are also square-free for relatively prime integers $p$ and $q$. Among such pairs $(p, q)$ with $p, q…
We show that assuming modest large cardinals, there is a definable class of ordinals, closed and unbounded beneath every uncountable cardinal, so that for any closed and unbounded subclasses $P, Q$, $\langle L[P],\in ,P \rangle$ and…