Related papers: Shuffle squares and ordered nest-free graphs
A graph of order $n>3$ is called {switching separable} if its modulo-2 sum with some complete bipartite graph on the same set of vertices is divided into two mutually independent subgraphs, each having at least two vertices. We prove the…
Bing doubling is an operation which produces a 2-component boundary link B(K) from a knot K. If K is slice, then B(K) is easily seen to be boundary slice. In this paper, we investigate whether the converse holds. Our main result is that if…
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…
An edit distance is a metric between words that quantifies how two words differ by counting the number of edit operations needed to transform one word into the other one. A word f is said isometric with respect to an edit distance if, for…
We describe a new non-constructive technique to show that squares are avoidable by an infinite word even if we force some letters from the alphabet to appear at certain occurrences. We show that as long as forced positions are at distance…
An orbit of $G$ is a subset $S$ of $V(G)$ such that $\phi(u)=v$ for any two vertices $u,v\in S$, where $\phi$ is an isomorphism of $G$. The orbit number of a graph $G$, denoted by $\text{Orb}(G)$, is the number of orbits of $G$. In [A Note…
A k-digraph is an orientation of a multi-graph that is without loops and contains at most k edges between any pair of distinct vertices. We obtain necessary and sufficient conditions for a sequence of non-negative integers in non-decreasing…
In 1968, Erd\"os defined the Shift Graph as the graph whose vertices are the $k$-element subsets of $[n]=\{0,1,2,...,n-1\}$ such that $A=\{a_1,...,a_k\}$ and $B=\{b_1,...,b_k\}$ are neighbours iff $a_1<b_1=a_2<b_2=a_3<... <b_{n-1}=a_n<b_n$.…
It is shown that shift graphs can be realized as disjointness graphs of 1-intersecting curves in the plane. This implies that the latter class of graphs is not $\chi$-bounded.
A fair coin is flipped $n$ times, and two finite sequences of heads and tails (words) $A$ and $B$ of the same length are given. Each time the word $A$ appears in the sequence of coin flips, Alice gets a point, and each time the word $B$…
A nut graph is a nontrivial simple graph whose adjacency matrix contains a one-dimensional null space spanned by a vector without zero entries. Moreover, an $\ell$-circulant graph is a graph that admits a cyclic group of automorphisms…
A word $\bar{w} = \bar{u}\bar{u}$ is a $long$ $square$ if $\bar{u}$ is of length at least 3; a word $\bar{w}$ is $long$-$square$-$free$ if $\bar{w}$ contains no sub-word that is a long square. We can use words to generate graph colorings; a…
The sequence of partial sums of Fibonacci numbers, beginning with $2$, $4$, $7$, $12$, $20$, $33,\dots$, has several combinatorial interpretations (OEIS A000071). For instance, the $n$-th term in this sequence is the number of length-$n$…
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…
We investigate the mathematics behind unshuffles, a type of card shuffle closely related to classical perfect shuffles. To perform an unshuffle, deal all the cards alternately into two piles and then stack the one pile on top of the other.…
A graph $G$ with four or more vertices is called bicritical if the removal of any pair of distinct vertices of $G$ results in a graph with a perfect matching. A bicritical graph is minimal if the deletion of each edge results in a…
An interesting phenomenon in combinatorics on words is when every recurrent word satisfying some avoidance constraints has the same factor set as a morphic word. An early example is the Hall-Thue word, fixed point of the morphism…
A mixed Steiner system MS$(t,k,Q)$ is a set (code) $C$ of words of weight $k$ over an alphabet $Q$, where not all coordinates of a word have the same alphabet size, each word of weight $t$, over $Q$, has distance $k-t$ from exactly one…
A {\it vertex-ordered} graph is a graph equipped with a linear ordering of its vertices. A pair of independent edges in an ordered graph can exhibit one of the following three patterns: separated, nested or crossing. We say a pair of…
We analyze the mixing time of a popular shuffling machine known as the shelf shuffler. It is a modified version of a $2m$-handed riffle shuffle ($m=10$ in casinos) in which a deck of $n$ cards is split multinomially into $2m$ piles, the…