Related papers: Ten Squares Force an Overlap
This article is an exposition of recent results on self-similar sets, asserting that if the dimension is smaller than the trivial upper bound then there are almost overlaps between cylinders. We give a heuristic derivation of the theorem…
This proof without words demonstrates that there are $\binom{n+2}{4}$ equilateral triangles in the regular $n$-vertices-per-side triangular grid by describing a map from four-element subsets of $\{1,2, \dots, n+2\}$ into the set of…
We prove tight upper bounds for the number of vertices of a simple polygon that is the union or the intersection of two simple polygons with given numbers of convex and concave vertices. The similar question on graphs of the lower (or…
In this paper, it is proved that every sufficiently large even integer can be represented as the sum of two squares of primes, two cubes of primes, two biquadrates of primes and 16 powers of 2. Furthermore, there are at least 5.313% odd…
Consider the set of those binary words with no non-empty factors of the form $xxx^R$. Du, Mousavi, Schaeffer, and Shallit asked whether this set of words grows polynomially or exponentially with length. In this paper, we demonstrate the…
Every natural number greater than $2$ can be written as the sum of a prime and a square-free number, and recent work has imposed additional divisibility conditions on the square-free number. We overcome limitations in these works to prove…
Here is a square problem: in a unit square, is there a point with four rational distances to the vertices? A probability argument suggests a negative answer. This paper proves several special cases of the square problem: if the point sits…
A binary triangle of size $n$ is a triangle of zeroes and ones, with $n$ rows, built with the same local rule as the standard Pascal triangle modulo $2$. A binary triangle is said to be balanced if the absolute difference between the…
Building on previous results of Xing, we give new lower bounds on the rate of intersecting codes over large alphabets. The proof is constructive, and uses algebraic geometry, although nothing beyond the basic theory of linear systems on…
How many squares are spanned by $n$ points in the plane? Here we study the corresponding maximum possible number $S_{\square}(n)$ of squares and determine the exact values for all $n\le 17$. For $18\le n\le 100$ we give lower bounds for…
The repetition threshold is the smallest real number $\alpha$ such that there exists an infinite word over a $k$-letter alphabet that avoids repetition of exponent strictly greater than $\alpha$. This notion can be generalized to graph…
Let $D^+$ be the first octant of the Euclidean space and consider the integral cube grid $G$ in $D^+$. The intersections of each line with $G$ form an infinite sequence of three letters which can be considered as an extension of well-known…
We consider shift spaces in which elements of the alphabet may overlap nontransitively. We define a notion of entropy for such spaces, give several techniques for computing lower bounds for it, and show that it is equal to a limit of…
We define a set of binary matrices where any two of them can not be placed one on the other in a way such that the corresponding entries coincide. The rows of the matrices are obtained by means of Dyck words. The cardinality of the set of…
We consider the following novel variation on a classical avoidance problem from combinatorics on words: instead of avoiding repetitions in all factors of a word, we avoid repetitions in all factors where each individual factor is considered…
Recently, a new characterization of Lyndon words that are also perfectly clustering was proposed by Lapointe and Reutenauer (2024). A word over a ternary alphabet {a,b,c} is called perfectly clustering Lyndon if and only if it is the…
Let $C$ be a binary code of length $n$ with distances $0<d_1<\cdots<d_s\le n$. In this note we prove a general upper bound on the size of $C$ without any restriction on the distances $d_i$. The bound is asymptotically optimal.
The paper provides an elementary proof of Kenyon's necessary condition for the existence of a periodic tiling of the plane by squares with given periods. A similar new result on covering both sides of a rectangle by nonoverlaping squares is…
We characterize binary words that have exactly two unbordered conjugates and show that they can be expressed as a product of two palindromes.
Given a positive integer $n$, we let ${\rm sfp}(n)$ denote the squarefree part of $n$. We determine all positive integers $n$ for which $\max \{ {\rm sfp}(n), {\rm sfp}(n+1), {\rm sfp}(n+2) \} \leq 150$ by relating the problem to finding…