Related papers: Half-flips are 5-avoidable

In this paper we study the asymptotic behaviour of two relatively new complexity functions defined on infinite words and their relationship to periodicity. Given a factor $u$ of an infinite word $x$, we say $u$ is closed if it is a letter…

In this paper, we consider pattern avoidance in a subset of words on $\{1,1,2,2,\dots,n,n\}$ called reverse double lists. In particular a reverse double list is a word formed by concatenating a permutation with its reversal. We enumerate…

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…

We characterize the squares occurring in infinite overlap-free binary words and construct various alpha power-free binary words containing infinitely many overlaps.

While a characterization of unavoidable formulas (without reversal) is well-known, little is known about the avoidability of formulas with reversal in general. In this article, we characterize the unavoidable formulas with reversal that…

Word-representable graphs, characterized by the existence of a semi-transitive orientation, form a well-studied class of graphs. Comparability graphs form another well-studied class and constitute a subclass of word-representable graphs.…

Let $L_{k,\alpha}^{\mathbb{Z}}$ denote the set of all bi-infinite $\alpha$-power free words over an alphabet with $k$ letters, where $\alpha$ is a positive rational number and $k$ is positive integer. We prove that if $\alpha\geq 5$, $k\geq…

A pair of letters $x$ and $y$ are said to alternate in a word $w$ if, after removing all letters except for the copies of $x$ and $y$ from $w$, the resulting word is of the form $xyxy\ldots$ (of even or odd length) or $yxyx\ldots$ (of even…

We completely characterize the words that can be avoided in infinite squarefree ternary words.

Let u be a cyclic word in a free group F_n of finite rank n that has the minimum length over all cyclic words in its automorphic orbit, and let N(u) be the cardinality of the set {v: |v|=|u| and v= \phi(u) for some \phi \in \text {Aut}F_n}.…

The \emph{fractional matching preclusion number} of a graph $G$, denoted by $fmp(G)$, is the minimum number of edges whose deletion results in a graph that has no fractional perfect matchings. In this paper, we first give some sharp upper…

Given an infinite word over the alphabet $\{0,1,2,3\}$, we define a class of bipartite hereditary graphs $\mathcal{G}^\alpha$, and show that $\mathcal{G}^\alpha$ has unbounded clique-width unless $\alpha$ contains at most finitely many…

We give a new proof of the fact that every planar graph is 5-choosable, and use it to show that every graph drawn in the plane so that the distance between every pair of crossings is at least 15 is 5-choosable. At the same time we may allow…

A universal word for a finite alphabet $A$ and some integer $n\geq 1$ is a word over $A$ such that every word in $A^n$ appears exactly once as a subword (cyclically or linearly). It is well-known and easy to prove that universal words exist…

We give another proof of a theorem of Fife - understood broadly as providing a finite automaton that gives a complete description of all infinite binary overlap-free words. Our proof is significantly simpler than those in the literature. As…

In 2008, Kurosaki gave a new construction of a (bi-)infinite squarefree word over three letters. We show that in fact Kurosaki's word avoids 7/4+-powers, which, as shown by Dejean, is optimal over a 3-letter alphabet.

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 morphism h is unambiguous with respect to a word w if there is no other morphism g that maps w to the same image as h. In the present paper we study the question of whether, for any given word, there exists an unambiguous 1-uniform…

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…

In this work we consider morphisms that preserve well-known non-repeating properties: squarefreeness, cubefreeness, overlap-freeness and weak squarefreeness. Up to the present moment only the morphisms preserving three out of four…