Related papers: Distinct Squares in Circular Words

We revisit the so-called "Three Squares Lemma" by Crochemore and Rytter [Algorithmica 1995] and, using arguments based on Lyndon words, derive a more general variant which considers three overlapping squares which do not necessarily share a…

We study decompositions of words into subwords that are in some sense similar, which means that one subword may be obtained from the other by a relatively simple transformation. Our main inspiration are shuffle squares, an intriguing class…

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…

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…

A bound resembling Pascal's identity is presented for binary necklaces with fixed density using Lyndon words with fixed density. The result is generalized to k-ary necklaces and Lyndon words with fixed content. The bound arises in the study…

A \emph{square} is a finite non-empty word consisting of two identical adjacent blocks. A word is \emph{square-free} if it does not contain a square as a factor. In any finite word one may delete the repeated block of a square, obtaining…

A non-empty word $w$ is a border of the word $u$ if $\vert w\vert<\vert u\vert$ and $w$ is both a prefix and a suffix of $u$. A word $u$ with the border $w$ is closed if $u$ has exactly two occurrences of $w$. A word $u$ is privileged if…

Let $u \shuffle v$ denote the set of all shuffles of the words $u$ and $v$. It is shown that for each integer $n \geq 3$ there exists a square-free ternary word $u$ of length $n$ such that $u\shuffle u$ contains a square-free word. This…

Universal Cycles, or U-cycles, as originally defined by de Bruijn, are an efficient method to exhibit a large class of combinatorial objects in a compressed fashion, and with no repeats. de Bruijn's theorem states that U-cycles for $n$…

A universal cycle for permutations is a word of length n! such that each of the n! possible relative orders of n distinct integers occurs as a cyclic interval of the word. We show how to construct such a universal cycle in which only n+1…

A universal partial cycle (or upcycle) for $\mathcal{A}^n$ is a cyclic sequence that covers each word of length $n$ over the alphabet $\mathcal{A}$ exactly once -- like a De Bruijn cycle, except that we also allow a wildcard symbol…

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…

The avoidability, or unavoidability of patterns in words over finite alphabets has been studied extensively. A word (pattern) over a finite set is said to be unavoidable if, for all but finitely many words, there exists a morphism mapping…

A necklace can be considered as a cyclic list of $n$ red and $n$ blue beads in an arbitrary order, and the goal is to fold it into two and find a large cross-free matching of pairs of beads of different colors. We give a counterexample for…

Configurations are necklaces with prescribed numbers of red and black beads. Among all possible configurations, the regular one plays an important role in many applications. In this paper, several aspects of regular configurations are…

In 1999 Lyngs{\o} and Pedersen proposed a conjecture stating that every binary circular word of length $n$ with equal number of zeros and ones has an antipalindromic linear subsequence of length at least $\frac{2}{3}n$. No progress over a…

The subword complexity of a word $w$ over a finite alphabet $\mathcal{A}$ is a function that assigns for each positive integer $n$, the number of distinct subwords of length $n$ in $w$. The subword complexity of a word is a good measure of…

In this paper, we propose a class of elementary plane geometry problems closely related to the title of this paper. Here, a circle is the 1-dimensional curve bounding a disk. For any nonnegative integer, a circle is called $n$-enclosing if…

We investigate the scattered palindromic subwords in a finite word. We start by characterizing the words with the least number of scattered palindromic subwords. Then, we give an upper bound for the total number of palindromic subwords in a…

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…