Related papers: Asymptotically half of binary words are shuffle sq…
In 1976, Dekking showed that there exists an infinite binary word that contains neither squares yy with y >= 4 nor cubes xxx. We show that `cube' can be replaced by any fractional power > 5/2. We also consider the analogous problem where…
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…
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…
A word of length $n$ is rich if it contains $n$ nonempty palindromic factors. An infinite word is rich if all of its finite factors are rich. Baranwal and Shallit produced an infinite binary rich word with critical exponent $2+\sqrt{2}/2$…
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…
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…
A square is a factor $S = (S_1; S_2)$ where $S_1$ and $S_2$ have the same pattern, and a permutation is said to be square-free if it contains no non-trivial squares. The permutation is further said to be bicrucial if every extension to the…
A word is \emph{square-free} if it does not contain non-empty factors of the form $XX$. In 1906 Thue proved that there exist arbitrarily long square-free words over $3$-letter alphabet. We consider a new type of square-free words. 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 re-examine previous constructions of infinite binary words containing few distinct squares with the goal of finding the "simplest", in a certain sense. We exhibit several new constructions. Rather than using tedious case-based arguments…
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…
We relate binary words with a given number of subsequences to continued fractions of rational numbers with a given denominator. We deduce that there are binary strings of length $O(\log n \log \log n)$ with exactly $n$ subsequences; this…
An abelian square is a string of length 2n where the last n symbols form a permutation of the first n symbols. In this note we count the number of abelian squares and give an asymptotic estimate of this quantity.
In combinatorics on words, a word w of length n over an alphabet of size q is said to be privileged if n <= 1 or if n >= 2 and w has a privileged border that occurs exactly twice in w. Forsyth, Jayakumar and Shallit proved that there exist…
$\textit{Partial words}$ are words that contain, in addition to letters, special symbols $\diamondsuit$ called $\textit{holes}$. Two partial words of $a=a_0 \dots a_n$ and $b=b_0 \dots b_n$ are $\textit{compatible}$ if for all $i$, $a_i =…
What is the smallest number of random transpositions (meaning that we swap given pairs of elements with given probabilities) that we can make on an $n$-point set to ensure that each element is uniformly distributed -- in the sense that the…
We consider partial words with a unique position starting a power. We show that over a $k$ letter alphabet, a partial word with a unique position starting a square can contain at most $k$ squares. This is in contrast to full words which can…
Two finite words $u$ and $v$ are called Abelian equivalent if each letter occurs equally many times in both $u$ and $v$. The abelian closure $\mathcal{A}(\mathbf{x})$ of (the shift orbit closure of) an infinite word $\mathbf{x}$ is the set…
A correlation is a binary vector that encodes all possible positions of overlaps of two words, where an overlap for an ordered pair of words (u,v) occurs if a suffix of word u matches a prefix of word v. As multiple pairs can have the same…