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Related papers: Subword complexity and power avoidance

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Indexed languages are a classical notion in formal language theory, which has attracted attention in recent decades due to its role in higher-order model checking: They are precisely the languages accepted by order-2 pushdown automata. The…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Richard Mandel , Corto Mascle , Georg Zetzsche

Recently, Fici, Restivo, Silva, and Zamboni defined a $k$-anti-power to be a word of the form $w_1w_2\cdots w_k$, where $w_1,w_2,\ldots,w_k$ are distinct words of the same length. They defined $AP(x,k)$ to be the set of all positive…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2016-10-11 Colin Defant

This paper begins with a comprehensive overview of combinatorics on words and symbolic dynamics, covering their historical origins, fundamental concepts, and interconnections. Building upon this foundation, we introduce novel mathematical…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-05-19 Duaa Abdullah , Jasem Hamoud

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…

Group Theory · Mathematics 2023-09-11 Junho Peter Whang

For a complexity function $C$, the lower and upper $C$-complexity rates of an infinite word $\mathbf{x}$ are \[ \underline{C}(\mathbf x)=\liminf_{n\to\infty} \frac{C(\mathbf{x}\upharpoonright n)}n,\quad \overline{C}(\mathbf…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2020-10-15 Bjørn Kjos-Hanssen

Defant and Kravitz introduced generalizations of West's stack-sorting map $s$ from permutations to finite words. This raises questions as to how such generalizations could be applied in the field of combinatorics on words. The…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-04-29 John M. Campbell , Narad Rampersad

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…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2007-05-23 Peter Baláži , Zuzana Masáková , Edita Pelantová

Fici, Restivo, Silva, and Zamboni define a $\textit{$k$-anti-power}$ to be a concatenation of $k$ consecutive words that are pairwise distinct and have the same length. They ask for the maximum $k$ such that every aperiodic recurrent word…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2019-02-05 Aaron Berger , Colin Defant

An abelian square is the concatenation of two words that are anagrams of one another. A word of length $n$ can contain at most $\Theta(n^2)$ distinct factors, and there exist words of length $n$ containing $\Theta(n^2)$ distinct…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2017-02-27 Gabriele Fici , Filippo Mignosi , Jeffrey Shallit

We say that a word $w$ of length $kn$ is a $k$-\textit{antipower} if it can be written in the form $w_1 \cdots w_k$, where each $w_i$ is a distinct word of length $n$. We analyze prefixes of the Thue-Morse word $\textbf{t}$ and lengths of…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2019-10-01 Shyam Narayanan

Free words are elements of a free monoid, generated over an alphabet via the binary operation of concatenation. Casually speaking, a free word is a finite string of letters. Henceforth, we simply refer to them as words. Motivated by recent…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2015-09-16 Danny Rorabaugh

Circular words are cyclically ordered finite sequences of letters. We give a computer-free proof of the following result by Currie: square-free circular words over the ternary alphabet exist for all lengths $l$ except for 5, 7, 9, 10, 14,…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2010-10-26 Arseny M. Shur

Let us consider an infinite word and $k\geq 1$ an integer. By steps of $k$, we substitute a letter ofthis infinite word by the power of an external letter. The new word obtaining by this process is called $k$ to $k$ substitution of a power…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2024-05-31 Moussa Barro , K. Ernest Bognini , Boucaré Kientéga

In this paper, we construct a uniformely recurrent infinite word of low complexity without uniform frequencies of letters. This shows the optimality of a bound of Boshernitzan, which gives a sufficient condition for a uniformly recurrent…

Dynamical Systems · Mathematics 2022-10-06 Julien Cassaigne , Idrissa Kaboré

In 1938, Morse and Hedlund proved that the subword complexity function of an infinite word is either bounded or at least linearly growing. In 1982, Ehrenfeucht and Rozenberg proved that this gap property holds for the subword complexity…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2012-02-02 Julien Cassaigne , Francois Nicolas

Two words are $k$-binomially equivalent if each subword of length at most $k$ occurs the same number of times in both words. The $k$-binomial complexity of an infinite word is a counting function that maps $n$ to the number of $k$-binomial…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2022-12-07 Michel Rigo , Manon Stipulanti , Markus A. Whiteland

We study the structure of the language of binary cube-free words. Namely, we are interested in the cube-free words that cannot be infinitely extended preserving cube-freeness. We show the existence of such words with arbitrarily long finite…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2011-08-19 Elena A. Petrova , Arseny M. Shur

Let $f_W(n)$ be the number of different factors of length $n$ appearing in $W$. A classical result of Morse and Hedlund, stated in 1938, asserts that an infinite word $W$ is ultimately periodic if and only if $f_W(n)\leq n$ for some $n\in…

Rings and Algebras · Mathematics 2026-05-04 M. A. Khrystik

We consider three aspects of avoiding large squares in infinite binary words. First, we construct an infinite binary word avoiding both cubes xxx and squares yy with |y| >= 4; our construction is somewhat simpler than the original…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2007-05-23 Narad Rampersad , Jeffrey Shallit , Ming-wei Wang

We consider the following novel variation on a classical avoidance problem from combinatorics on words: instead of avoiding repetitions in all factors of a word, we avoid repetitions in all factors where each individual factor is considered…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2013-03-19 Hamoon Mousavi , Jeffrey Shallit