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A word is square-free if it does not contain a nonempty word of the form $XX$ as a factor. A famous 1906 result of Thue asserts that there exist arbitrarily long square-free words over a $3$-letter alphabet. We study square-free words with…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2022-09-20 Michał Dębski , Jarosław Grytczuk , Bartłomiej Pawlik

The combinatorics of squares in a word depends on how the equivalence of halves of the square is defined. We consider Abelian squares, parameterized squares, and order-preserving squares. The word $uv$ is an Abelian (parameterized,…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2016-04-11 Tomasz Kociumaka , Jakub Radoszewski , Wojciech Rytter , Tomasz Waleń

Using a new approach based on automatic sequences, logic, and a decision procedure, we reprove some old theorems about circularly squarefree words and unbordered conjugates in a new and simpler way. Furthermore, we prove three new results…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2019-04-18 Trevor Clokie , Daniel Gabric , Jeffrey Shallit

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…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-05-28 Jeffrey Shallit

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…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2022-03-03 Pamela Fleischmann , Tero Harju , Lukas Haschke , Jonas Höfer , Dirk Nowotka

Word-representable graphs are a class of graphs that can be represented by words, where edges and non-edges are determined by the alternation of letters in those words. Several papers in the literature have explored the…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-08-22 Herman Z. Q. Chen , Humaira Hameed , Sergey Kitaev

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…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Corentin Barloy , Michaël Cadilhac , Kyle Ockerlund

A triple array is a rectangular array containing letters, each letter occurring equally often with no repeats in rows or columns, such that the number of letters common to two rows, two columns, or a row and a column are (possibly…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2019-05-31 R. A. Bailey , Peter J. Cameron , Tomas Nilson

A word is square-free if it does not contain nonempty factors of the form $XX$. In 1906 Thue proved that there exist arbitrarily long square-free words over a $3$-letter alphabet. It was proved recently [7] that among these words there are…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2021-05-04 Jarosław Grytczuk , Hubert Kordulewski , Bartłomiej Pawlik

A pile-scramble shuffle is one of the most effective shuffles in card-based cryptography. Indeed, many card-based protocols are constructed from pile-scramble shuffles. This article aims to study the power of pile-scramble shuffles. In…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-12-17 Kengo Miyamoto , Kazumasa Shinagawa

A graph $G = (V, E)$ is word-representable if there exists a word $w$ over the alphabet $V$ such that, for any two distinct vertices $x, y \in V$, $xy \in E$ if and only if $x$ and $y$ alternate in $w$. Two letters $x$ and $y$ are said to…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-12-08 Suchanda Roy , Ramesh Hariharasubramanian

In this paper we introduce and study a new property of infinite words: An infinite word $x\in A^\mathbb{N}$, with values in a finite set $A$, is said to be $k$-self-shuffling $(k\geq 2)$ if $x$ admits factorizations: $x=\prod_{i=0}^\infty…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2014-11-17 Émilie Charlier , Teturo Kamae , Svetlana Puzynina , Luca Q. Zamboni

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…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2020-07-06 Tero Harju

A split graph is a graph whose vertex set can be partitioned into a clique and an independent set. The word-representability of split graphs was studied in a series of papers in the literature, and the class of word-representable split…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-04-29 Tithi Dwary , Khyodeno Mozhui , K. V. Krishna

We study a family of shuffling operators on the symmetric group $S_n$, which includes the top-to-random shuffle. The general shuffling scheme consists of removing one card at a time from the deck (according to some probability distribution)…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2024-05-30 Darij Grinberg , Nadia Lafrenière

Fici and Saarela ([2]) conjectured that a binary word of length n contains at least $\lfloor n/4 \rfloor$ abelian squares. We slightly extend this conjecture and show that it holds in some special cases. In all other cases we have the…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-04-28 Szilard Zsolt Fazekas , Adam Mammoliti , Robert Mercas , Jamie Simpson

Entringer, Jackson, and Schatz conjectured in 1974 that every infinite cubefree binary word contains arbitrarily long squares. In this paper we show this conjecture is false: there exist infinite cubefree binary words avoiding all squares…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2007-05-23 Narad Rampersad , Jeffrey Shallit , Ming-wei Wang

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…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2015-06-12 Gabriele Fici , Filippo Mignosi

Letters $x$ and $y$ alternate in a word $w$ if after deleting in $w$ all letters but the copies of $x$ and $y$ we either obtain a word $xyxy\cdots$ (of even or odd length) or a word $yxyx\cdots$ (of even or odd length). A graph $G=(V,E)$ is…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2017-09-29 Sergey Kitaev , Yangjing Long , Jun Ma , Hehui Wu

In 2007, Grytczuk conjecture that for any sequence $(\ell_i)_{i\ge1}$ of alphabets of size $3$ there exists a square-free infinite word $w$ such that for all $i$, the $i$-th letter of $w$ belongs to $\ell_i$. The result of Thue of 1906…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2021-05-12 Matthieu Rosenfeld