Related papers: Half-flips are 5-avoidable

We consider three aspects of avoiding large squares in infinite binary words. First, we construct an infinite binary word avoiding both cubes xxx and squares yy with |y| >= 4; our construction is somewhat simpler than the original…

Given a nonempty finite word $v$, let $PL(v)$ be the palindromic length of $v$; it means the minimal number of palindromes whose concatenation is equal to $v$. Let $v^R$ denote the reversal of $v$. Given a finite or infinite word $y$, let…

A finite word u is said to be bordered if u has a proper prefix which is also a suffix of u, and unbordered otherwise. Ehrenfeucht and Silberger proved that an infinite word is purely periodic if and only if it contains only finitely many…

Word $W$ is an instance of word $V$ provided there is a homomorphism $\phi$ mapping letters to nonempty words so that $\phi(V) = W$. For example, taking $\phi$ such that $\phi(c)=fr$, $\phi(o)=e$ and $\phi(l)=zer$, we see that "freezer" is…

Recently, Grytczuk, Kordulewski, and Niewiadomski defined an extremal word over an alphabet $\mathbb{A}$ to be a word with the property that inserting any letter from $\mathbb{A}$ at any position in the word yields a given pattern. In this…

We define a family of natural decompositions of Sturmian words in Christoffel words, called *reversible Christoffel* (RC) factorizations. They arise from the observation that two Sturmian words with the same language have (almost always)…

We call a pair $(m,f)$ of integers, $m\geq 1$, $0\leq f \leq \binom{m}{2}$, \emph{absolutely avoidable} if there is $n_0$ such that for any pair of integers $(n,e)$ with $n>n_0$ and $0\leq e\leq \binom{n}{2}$ there is a graph on $n$…

We study cube-free words over arbitrary non-unary finite alphabets and prove the following structural property: for every pair $(u,v)$ of $d$-ary cube-free words, if $u$ can be infinitely extended to the right and $v$ can be infinitely…

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 called closed if it has a prefix which is also its suffix and there is no internal occurrences of this prefix in the word. In this paper we study words that are rich in closed factors, i.e., which contain the maximal possible…

We prove that every $n$-letter word over $k$-letter alphabet contains some word as a subsequence in at least $k^{n/4k(1+o(1))}$ many ways, and that this is sharp as $k\to\infty$. For fixed $k$, we show that the analogous number deviates…

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…

The avoidability of binary patterns by binary cube-free words is investigated and the exact bound between unavoidable and avoidable patterns is found. All avoidable patterns are shown to be D0L-avoidable. For avoidable patterns, the growth…

If $u$ and $v$ are two words, the correlation of $u$ over $v$ is a binary word that encodes all possible overlaps between $u$ and $v$. This concept was introduced by Guibas and Odlyzko as a key element of their method for enumerating the…

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…

In 1982, Seebold showed that the only overlap-free binary words that are the fixed points of non-identity morphisms are the Thue-Morse word and its complement. We strengthen Seebold's result by showing that the same result holds if the term…

For any functions $f(x)$, $g(x)$ from $\mathbb {N}$ to $\mathbb {R}$ we call repeats $uvu$ such that $g(|u|)\le |v|\le f(|u|)$ as {\it $f,g$-gapped repeats}. We study the possible number of $f,g$-gapped repeats in words of fixed length~$n$.…

We prove that for any sequence of binary alphabets $\mathcal{A}_1,\mathcal{A}_2,\dots$, there exists a cube-free word $c_1c_2\dots$ so that $c_1\in\mathcal{A}_1,c_2\in\mathcal{A}_2,\dots$. In particular, for every $n$, there are at least…

A language L is prefix-free if, whenever words u and v are in L and u is a prefix of v, then u=v. Suffix-, factor-, and subword-free languages are defined similarly, where "subword" means "subsequence". A language is bifix-free if it is…

We prove that, for any pure morphic word $w$, if the frequencies of all letters in $w$ exist, then the frequencies of all factors in $w$ exist as well. This result answers a question of Saari in his doctoral thesis.