Related papers: Variations on shuffle squares
The shuffle product \(u\shuffle v\) of two words \(u\) and \(v\) is the set of all words which can be obtained by interleaving \(u\) and \(v\). Motivated by the paper \emph{The Shuffle Product: New Research Directions} by Restivo (2015) we…
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…
Cyclic words are equivalence classes of cyclic permutations of ordinary words. When a group is given by a rewriting relation, a rewriting system on cyclic words is induced, which is used to construct algorithms to find minimal length…
A square-free word $w$ over a fixed alphabet $\Sigma$ is extremal if every word obtained from $w$ by inserting a single letter from $\Sigma$ (at any position) contains a square. Grytczuk et al. recently introduced the concept of extremal…
A permutation is square-free if it does not contain two consecutive factors of length two or more that are order-isomorphic. A permutation is bicrucial with respect to squares if it is square-free but any extension of it to the right or to…
We introduce new avoidability problems for words by considering equivalence relations, k-abelian equivalences, which lie properly in between equality and commutative equality, i.e. abelian equality. For two k-abelian equivalent words the…
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…
We identify a subclass of the regular commutative languages that is closed under the iterated shuffle, or shuffle closure. In particular, it is regularity-preserving on this subclass. This subclass contains the commutative group languages…
Partial words are sequences over a finite alphabet that may contain wildcard symbols, called holes, which match or are compatible with all letters; partial words without holes are said to be full words (or simply words). Given an infinite…
The meanings and relationships of words shift over time. This phenomenon is referred to as semantic shift. Research focused on understanding how semantic shifts occur over multiple time periods is essential for gaining a detailed…
Brlek et al. (2008) studied smooth infinite words and established some results on letter frequency, recurrence, reversal and complementation for 2-letter alphabets having same parity. In this paper, we explore smooth infinite words over…
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…
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…
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,…
A permutation statistic $\operatorname{st}$ is said to be shuffle-compatible if the distribution of $\operatorname{st}$ over the set of shuffles of two disjoint permutations $\pi$ and $\sigma$ depends only on $\operatorname{st}\pi$,…
A tangram is a word in which every letter occurs an even number of times. Thus it can be cut into parts that can be arranged into two identical words. The \emph{cut number} of a tangram is the minimum number of required cuts in this…
Consider a permutation p to be any finite list of distinct positive integers. A statistic is a function St whose domain is all permutations. Let S(p,q) be the set of shuffles of two disjoint permutations p and q. We say that St is shuffle…
We characterize the squares occurring in infinite overlap-free binary words and construct various alpha power-free binary words containing infinitely many overlaps.
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 word is level if each letter appears in it the same number of times, plus or minus 1. We give a complete characterization of the lengths for which level ternary circular square-free words exist. Key words: combinatorics on words, circular…