Related papers: Partial words with a unique position starting a sq…

We consider the language consisting of all words such that it is possible to obtain the empty word by iteratively deleting powers. It turns out that in the case of deleting squares in binary words this language is regular, and in the case…

A word is square-free if it does not contain nonempty factors of the form $XX$. In 1906 Thue proved that there exist arbitrarily long square-free words over a $3$-letter alphabet. It was proved recently [7] that among these words there are…

We show that paper folding words contain arbitrarily large abelian powers.

We re-examine previous constructions of infinite binary words containing few distinct squares with the goal of finding the "simplest", in a certain sense. We exhibit several new constructions. Rather than using tedious case-based arguments…

We consider words over a binary alphabet. A word $w$ is overlap-free if it does not have factors (blocks of consecutive letters) of the form $uvuvu$ for nonempty $u$. Let $M(w)$ denote the number of positions that are middle positions of…

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…

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…

An abelian anti-power of order $k$ (or simply an abelian $k$-anti-power) is a concatenation of $k$ consecutive words of the same length having pairwise distinct Parikh vectors. This definition generalizes to the abelian setting the notion…

In 1976, Dekking showed that there exists an infinite binary word that contains neither squares yy with y >= 4 nor cubes xxx. We show that `cube' can be replaced by any fractional power > 5/2. We also consider the analogous problem where…

A \emph{power} is a word of the form $\underbrace{uu...u}_{k \; \text{times}}$, where $u$ is a word and $k$ is a positive integer; the power is also called a {\em $k$-power} and $k$ is its {\em exponent}. We prove that for any $k \ge 2$,…

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…

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…

Fraenkel and Simpson showed that the number of distinct squares in a word of length n is bounded from above by 2n, since at most two distinct squares have their rightmost, or last, occurrence begin at each position. Improvements by Ilie to…

In this article we give two different ways of representations of circular words. Representations with tuples are intended as a compact notation, while representations with trees give a way to easily process all conjugates of a word. The…

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…

Given a set I of word, the set of all words obtained by the shuffle of (copies of) words of I is naturally provided with a partial order. In [FS05], the authors have opened the problem of the characterization of the finite sets I such that…

We survey structures endowed with natural partial orderings and prove their universality. These partial orders include partial orders on sets of words, partial orders formed by geometric objects, grammars, polynomials and homomorphism order…

Here is a square problem: in a unit square, is there a point with four rational distances to the vertices? A probability argument suggests a negative answer. This paper proves several special cases of the square problem: if the point sits…

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…

The (bitwise) complement $\overline{x}$ of a binary word $x$ is obtained by changing each $0$ in $x$ to $1$ and vice versa. An $\textit{antisquare}$ is a nonempty word of the form $x\, \overline{x}$. In this paper, we study infinite binary…