Related papers: A Tighter Upper Bound for the Number of Distinct S…
A {\em square} is a word of the form $uu$. In this paper we prove that for a given finite word $w$, the number of distinct square factors of $w$ is bounded by $|w|-|\Alphabet(w)|+1$, where $|w|$ denotes the length of $w$ and…
A square is a word of the form $xx$ for a non-empty word $x$. Brlek and Li [Comb. Theory, 2025] proved that the number of distinct squares in a word $w$ of length $n$ is at most $n - \sigma$, where $\sigma$ is the number of letters used in…
A circular word, or a necklace, is an equivalence class under conjugation of a word. A fundamental question concerning regularities in standard words is bounding the number of distinct squares in a word of length $n$. The famous conjecture…
A non-empty word $w$ is a \emph{border} of a word $u$ if $\vert w\vert<\vert u\vert$ and $w$ is both a prefix and a suffix of $u$. A word $u$ is \emph{privileged} if $\vert u\vert\leq 1$ or if $u$ has a privileged border $w$ that appears…
A \emph{square} is a finite non-empty word consisting of two identical adjacent blocks. A word is \emph{square-free} if it does not contain a square as a factor. In any finite word one may delete the repeated block of a square, obtaining…
A power is a word of the form $\underbrace{uu...u}_{k \; \text{times}}$, where $u$ is a word and $k$ is a positive integer and a square is a word of the form $uu$. Fraenkel and Simpson conjectured in 1998 that the number of distinct squares…
A non-empty word $w$ is a border of the word $u$ if $\vert w\vert<\vert u\vert$ and $w$ is both a prefix and a suffix of $u$. A word $u$ with the border $w$ is closed if $u$ has exactly two occurrences of $w$. A word $u$ is privileged if…
A \emph{power} is a word of the form $\underbrace{uu...u}_{k \; \text{times}}$, where $u$ is a word and $k$ is a positive integer; the power is also called a {\em $k$-power} and $k$ is its {\em exponent}. We prove that for any $k \ge 2$,…
A finite word $w$ of length $n$ contains at most $n+1$ distinct palindromic factors. If the bound $n+1$ is attained, the word $w$ is called rich. An infinite word $w$ is called rich if every finite factor of $w$ is rich. Let $w$ be a word…
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…
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…
We investigate the problem of the maximum number of cubic subwords (of the form $www$) in a given word. We also consider square subwords (of the form $ww$). The problem of the maximum number of squares in a word is not well understood.…
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…
A word~$w$ has a border $u$ if $u$ is a non-empty proper prefix and suffix of $u$. A word~$w$ is said to be \emph{closed} if $w$ is of length at most $1$ or if $w$ has a border that occurs exactly twice in $w$. A word~$w$ is said to be…
This note is an attempt to attack a conjecture of Fraenkel and Simpson stated in 1998 concerning the number of distinct squares in a finite word. By counting the number of (right-)special factors, we give an upper bound of the number of…
A square is the concatenation of a nonempty word with itself. A word has period p if its letters at distance p match. The exponent of a nonempty word is the quotient of its length over its smallest period. In this article we give a proof of…
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,…
An abelian square is the concatenation of two words that are anagrams of one another. A word of length $n$ can contain at most $\Theta(n^2)$ distinct factors, and there exist words of length $n$ containing $\Theta(n^2)$ distinct…
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…
A word w is rich if it has |w|+1 many distinct palindromic factors, including the empty word. A word is square-free if it does not have a factor uu, where u is a non-empty word. Pelantov\'a and Starosta (Discrete Math. 313 (2013)) proved…