Related papers: How far away must forced letters be so that square…
We study three covering problems in the plane. Our original motivation for these problems come from trajectory analysis. The first is to decide whether a given set of line segments can be covered by up to four unit-sized, axis-parallel…
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 avoiding mesosomes -- that is, words of the form $xx'$ with $x'$ a conjugate of $x$ that is different from $x$ -- over a binary alphabet. We give a structure theorem for mesosome-avoiding words, count how many there are,…
Given a set of n unit squares in the plane, the goal is to rank them in space in such a way that only few squares see each other vertically. We prove that ranking the squares according to the lexicographic order of their centers results in…
We show that for every integer $b\geq 3$, there exists a link in a $b$-bridge position with respect to a critical bridge sphere. In fact, for each $b$, we construct an infinite family of links which we call square whose bridge spheres are…
An abelian square is the concatenation of two words that are anagrams of one another. A word of length $n$ can contain $\Theta(n^2)$ distinct factors that are abelian squares. We study infinite words such that the number of abelian square…
We prove that, for all even $n\geq10$, there exists a latin square of order $n$ with at least one transversal, yet all transversals coincide on $ \big\lfloor n/6 \big\rfloor$ entries. These latin squares have at least $ 19 n^2/36 + O(n)$…
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…
We investigate the properties of formal languages expressible in terms of formulas over quantifier-free theories of word equations, arithmetic over length constraints, and language membership predicates for the classes of regular, visibly…
How can you fill a $3\times 3$ grid with the letters A and M so that the word ``AMM'' appears as many times as possible in the grid? More generally, given a word $w$ of length $n$, how can you fill an $n\times n$ grid so that $w$ appears as…
We investigate the number of squares in a very broad family of binary recurrence sequences with $u_{0}=1$. We show that there are at most two distinct squares in such sequences (the best possible result), except under such very special…
The well-known three distance theorem states that there are at most three distinct gaps between consecutive elements in the set of the first n multiples of any real number. We generalise this theorem to higher dimensions under a suitable…
We present four constructions of inversion sequences, and use them to compute the enumeration sequences of 24 classes of pattern-avoiding inversion sequences. This completes the enumeration of inversion sequences avoiding one or two…
The standard algorithm for Levenshtein distance, treats trailing whitespace the same as any other letter or symbol. However, when humans compare 2 strings, we implicitly assume that both strings are padded by infinite trailing whitespace.…
The deviation of the observed frequency of a word $w$ from its expected frequency in a given sequence $x$ is used to determine whether or not the word is avoided. This concept is particularly useful in DNA linguistic analysis. The value of…
We investigate the problem of deciding whether a given preference profile is close to having a certain nice structure, as for instance single-peaked, single-caved, single-crossing, value-restricted, best-restricted, worst-restricted,…
Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) interpreted on finite traces is a robust specification framework popular in formal verification. However, despite the high interest in the logic in recent years, the topic of their quantitative extensions is not…
In this paper we study pattern avoidance in Latin Squares, which gives us a two dimensional analogue of the well studied notion of pattern avoidance in permutations. Our main results include enumerating and characterizing the Latin Squares…
A digraph is $3$-dicritical if it cannot be vertex-partitioned into two sets inducing acyclic digraphs, but each of its proper subdigraphs can. We give a human-readable proof that the number of 3-dicritical semi-complete digraphs is finite.…
An avoidance pattern where the letters within an occurrence of which are required to be adjacent is referred to as a subword. In this paper, we enumerate members of the set NC_n of non-crossing partitions of length n according to the number…