Related papers: A small morphism giving Abelian repetition thresho…
In this paper we study an abelian version of the notion of return word. Our main result is a new characterization of Sturmian words via abelian returns. Namely, we prove that a word is Sturmian if and only if each of its factors has two or…
We study infinite words fixed by a morphism and their derived words. A derived word is a coding of return words to a factor. We exhibit two examples of sets of morphisms which are closed under derivation --- any derived word with respect to…
We construct an infinite word $w$ over the $5$-letter alphabet such that for every factor $f$ of $w$ of length at least two, there exists a cyclic permutation of $f$ that is not a factor of $w$. In other words, $w$ does not contain a…
We show that, in an alphabet of $n$ symbols, the number of words of length $n$ whose number of different symbols is away from $(1-1/e)n$, which is the value expected by the Poisson distribution, has exponential decay in $n$. We use…
We are interested in the maximal number of distinct squares in a word. This problem was introduced by Fraenkel and Simpson, who presented a bound of 2n for a word of length n, and conjectured that the bound was less than n. Being that the…
The problem addressed concerns the determination of the average number of successive attempts of guessing a word of a certain length consisting of letters with given probabilities of occurrence. Both first- and second-order approximations…
The number of maximal abelian subgroups of a finite p-group is shown to be congruent to 1 modulo p.
We show that paper folding words contain arbitrarily large abelian powers.
We present two ways in which an infinite universal alphabet may be generated using a novel rewrite system that conserves zero (a special character of the alphabet and the symbol for that character) at every step. The recursive method…
A permutation is said to be \emph{alternating} if it starts with rise and then descents and rises come in turn. In this paper we study the generating function for the number of alternating permutations on $n$ letters that avoid or contain…
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…
Let $s_n$ be the number of words consisting of the ternary alphabet consisting of the digits 0, 1, and 2 such that no subword (or factor) is a square (a word concatenated with itself, e.g., $11$, $1212$, or $102102$). From computational…
Weakly recognizing morphisms from free semigroups onto finite semigroups are a classical way for defining the class of omega-regular languages, i.e., a set of infinite words is weakly recognizable by such a morphism if and only if it is…
We investigate abelian repetitions in Sturmian words. We exploit a bijection between factors of Sturmian words and subintervals of the unitary segment that allows us to study the periods of abelian repetitions by using classical results of…
In this short note it is shown that every graph of diameter 2 and minimum degree at least 3 contains a cycle of length 4 or 8. This result contributes to the study of the Erd\H{o}s-Gy\'arf\'as Conjecture by confirming it for the class of…
The notion of a two-dimensional word arises naturally in the study of combinatorics on words, while the iterative construction of pedal triangles results in a rich dynamical system in the study of geometry. At first, these two classes of…
We say that a finite factor $f$ of a word $w$ is \emph{imaged} if there exists a non-erasing morphism $m$, distinct from the identity, such that $w$ contains $m(f)$. We show that every infinite word contains an imaged factor of length at…
Given a finite word $w$ over a finite alphabet $V$, consider the graph with vertex set $V$ and with an edge between two elements of $V$ if and only if the two elements alternate in the word $w$. Such a graph is said to be word-representable…
Given an infinite linear group with a finite set of generators, we show that the shortest word length of an element of infinite order has an upper bound that depends only on the number of generators and the degree. This provides a…
We construct words with small image in a given finite alternating or unimodular group. This shows that word width in these groups is unbounded in general.