Related papers: Near-squares in binary recurrence sequences

A word is \emph{square-free} if it does not contain non-empty factors of the form $XX$. In 1906 Thue proved that there exist arbitrarily long square-free words over $3$-letter alphabet. We consider a new type of square-free words. A…

A well-known conjecture asserts that there are infinitely many primes $p$ for which $p - 1$ is a perfect square. We obtain upper and lower bounds of matching order on the number of pairs of distinct primes $p,q \le x$ for which $(p - 1)(q -…

We describe an algorithm that takes as input a complex sequence $(u_n)$ given by a linear recurrence relation with polynomial coefficients along with initial values, and outputs a simple explicit upper bound $(v_n)$ such that $|u_n| \leq…

It is unknown at present whether a magic square of squared integers exists. Such an object is defined to be a 3 by 3 grid of 9 distinct integer squares, such that the entries of each row, column, and two main diagonals sum to the same…

Let $\mathcal{P}_r$ denote an almost-prime with at most $r$ prime factors, counted according to multiplicity. Suppose that $a$ and $q$ are positive integers satisfying $(a,q)=1$. Denote by $\mathcal{P}_2(a,q)$ the least almost-prime…

Let a tribonacci sequence be a sequence of integers satisfying $a_k=a_{k-1}+a_{k-2}+a_{k-3}$ for all $k\ge 4$. For any positive integers $k$ and $n$, denote by $f_k(n)$ the number of tribonacci sequences with $a_1, a_2, a_3>0$ and with…

The binomial notation (w u) represents the number of occurrences of the word u as a (scattered) subword in w. We first introduce and study possible uses of a geometrical interpretation of (w ab) and (w ba) when a and b are distinct letters.…

Let $I_k = [(2k-1)^2, (2k+1)^2)$ for $k \geq 1$. Starting from the odd-composite matrix $(b_{ij})$ with $b_{ij} = (2i-1)(2j-1)$, introduced by the author in [1], we define for each odd integer $n$ the \emph{matrix multiplicity} $r(n)$, the…

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…

We study integral almost square-free modular categories; i.e., integral modular categories of Frobenius-Perron dimension $p^nm$, where $p$ is a prime number, $m$ is a square-free natural number and ${\rm gcd}(p,m)=1$. We prove that if…

A non-empty word $w$ is a \emph{border} of a word $u$ if $\vert w\vert<\vert u\vert$ and $w$ is both a prefix and a suffix of $u$. A word $u$ is \emph{privileged} if $\vert u\vert\leq 1$ or if $u$ has a privileged border $w$ that appears…

Let q>1 and m>0 be relatively prime integers. We find an explicit period $\nu_m(q)$ such that for any integers n>0 and r we have $[n+\nu_m(q),r]_m(a)=[n,r]_m(a) (mod q)$ whenever a is an integer with $\gcd(1-(-a)^m,q)=1$, or a=-1 (mod q),…

If A is a set of nonnegative integers containing 0, then there is a unique nonempty set B of nonnegative integers such that every positive integer can be written in the form a+b, where a\in A and b\in B, in an even number of ways. We…

This paper is concerned with the problem of finding two sets of integers, $\{a_1, a_2, \ldots$, $a_m\}$ and $\{b_1, b_2, \ldots, b_n\}$, such that all the $mn$ sums $a_i+b_j, i=1, \ldots, m, j=1, \ldots, n$, are perfect squares. A method is…

Two finite words $u,v$ are 2-binomially equivalent if, for all words $x$ of length at most 2, the number of occurrences of $x$ as a (scattered) subword of $u$ is equal to the number of occurrences of $x$ in $v$. This notion is a refinement…

Let us call a sequence of numbers heapable if they can be sequentially inserted to form a binary tree with the heap property, where each insertion subsequent to the first occurs at a leaf of the tree, i.e. below a previously placed number.…

The Erd\H{o}s-Mollin-Walsh conjecture, asserting the nonexistence of three consecutive powerful integers, remains a celebrated open problem in number theory. A natural line of inquiry, following recent work by Chan (2025), is to investigate…

Let $\mathcal{P}_r$ denote an almost-prime with at most $r$ prime factors, counted according to multiplicity. In this paper, it is proved that, for $12\leqslant b\leqslant 35$ and for every sufficiently large odd integer $N$, the equation…

For earlier considered our sequence A166944 in [4] we prove three statements of its connection with twin primes. We also give a sufficient condition for the infinity of twin primes and pose several new conjectures; among them we propose a…

Aperiodic autocorrelation is an important indicator of performance of sequences used in communications, remote sensing, and scientific instrumentation. Knowing a sequence's autocorrelation function, which reports the autocorrelation at…