Related papers: Variations on shuffle squares
We define a family of natural decompositions of Sturmian words in Christoffel words, called *reversible Christoffel* (RC) factorizations. They arise from the observation that two Sturmian words with the same language have (almost always)…
We discuss a notion of shuffle for trees which extends the usual notion of a shuffle for two natural numbers. We give several equivalent descriptions, and prove some algebraic and combinatorial properties. In addition, we characterize…
Given a countable set X (usually taken to be the natural numbers or integers), an infinite permutation, \pi, of X is a linear ordering of X. This paper investigates the combinatorial complexity of infinite permutations on the natural…
We construct bases of quasi-symmetric functions whose product rule is given by the shuffle of binary words, as for multiple zeta values in their integral representations, and then extend the construction to the algebra of free…
In single-core processors, concurrency requires that multiple processes be interleaved into a single thread of execution by a scheduler. The language-theoretic operation that corresponds to this is the shuffle of two languages: the set of…
We show that, with the exception of the words $a^2ba^2$ and $b^2ab^2$, all (finite or infinite) binary patterns in the Prouhet-Thue-Morse sequence can actually be found in that sequence as segments (up to exchange of letters in the infinite…
The additive square problem is a relatively famous open problem in the area of combinatorics on words: Does there exist an infinite word over a finite alphabet, such that no two consecutive blocks of the same length have the same sum? In…
In this paper I present a conjecture for a recursive algorithm that finds each permutation of combining two sets of objects (AKA the Shuffle Product). This algorithm provides an efficient way to navigate this problem, as each atomic…
A word over an ordered alphabet is said to be clustering if identical letters appear adjacently in its Burrows-Wheeler transform. Such words are strictly related to (discrete) interval exchange transformations. We use an extended version of…
Recently, a new characterization of Lyndon words that are also perfectly clustering was proposed by Lapointe and Reutenauer (2024). A word over a ternary alphabet {a,b,c} is called perfectly clustering Lyndon if and only if it is the…
Magic squares have been an enthralling topic in mathematics for centuries. They are formed by filling in all the cells of a square matrix with the numbers starting from one so that the sum of all rows, columns, and diagonals is the same.…
The Shortest Common Supersequence problem (SCS for short) consists in finding a shortest common supersequence of a finite set of words on a fixed alphabet Sigma. It is well-known that its decision version denoted [SR8] in [Garey and…
For the word $\omega = \underbrace{11\ldots 1}_{x_1}\underbrace{22\ldots2}_{x_2}\ldots\underbrace{nn\ldots n}_{x_n},$ denote by $\mathsf{A}(x_1, x_2, \ldots, x_n)$ the number of its anagrams without fixed letters. While the function…
It is known that there are infinite words over finite alphabets with Abelian repetition threshold arbitrarily close to 1; however, the construction previously used involves huge alphabets. In this note we give a short cyclic morphism…
A formal n-square is the set of positions in an square matrix of size n. A shuffle of a formal n-square consists of independent rotations of each row and of each column. A key result turns out to be valid at least for n <= 34 and n = 37:…
For a word $S$, let $f(S)$ be the largest integer $m$ such that there are two disjoints identical (scattered) subwords of length $m$. Let $f(n, \Sigma) = \min \{f(S): S \text{is of length} n, \text{over alphabet} \Sigma \}$. Here, it is…
Building an infinite square-free word by appending one letter at a time while simultaneously avoiding the creation of squares is most likely to fail. When the alphabet has two letters this approach is impossible. When the alphabet has three…
A universal cycle for permutations is a word of length n! such that each of the n! possible relative orders of n distinct integers occurs as a cyclic interval of the word. We show how to construct such a universal cycle in which only n+1…
Given two symmetric and positive semidefinite square matrices $A, B$, is it true that any matrix given as the product of $m$ copies of $A$ and $n$ copies of $B$ in a particular sequence must be dominated in the spectral norm by the ordered…
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…