Related papers: Cubefree binary words avoiding long squares
A conjecture of Berge suggests that every bridgeless cubic graph can have its edges covered with at most five perfect matchings. Since three perfect matchings suffice only when the graph in question is $3$-edge-colourable, the rest of cubic…
Twins in a finite word are formed by a pair of identical subwords placed at disjoint sets of positions. We investigate the maximum length of twins in a random word over a $k$-letter alphabet. The obtained lower bounds for small values of…
For coprime positive integers $a, b, c$, where $a+b=c$, $\gcd(a,b,c)=1$ and $1\leq a < b$, the famous $abc$ conjecture (Masser and Oesterl\`e, 1985) states that for $\varepsilon > 0$, only finitely many $abc$ triples satisfy $c >…
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.…
In combinatorics on words, a word $w$ over an alphabet $\Sigma$ is said to avoid a pattern $p$ over an alphabet $\Delta$ if there is no factor $f$ of $w$ such that $f=h(p)$ where $h:\Delta^*\to\Sigma^*$ is a non-erasing morphism. A pattern…
We consider sets of factors that can be avoided in square-free words on two-generator free groups. The elements of the group are presented in terms of 0,1,2,3 such that 0 and 2 (resp.,1 and 3) are inverses of each other so that 02, 20, 13…
We answer a question of Harju: An infinite square-free ternary word with an $n$-stem factorization exists for any $n\ge 13$. We show that there are uniform ternary morphisms of length $k$ for every $k\ge 23$. This resolves almost completely…
We obtain the following results about the avoidance of ternary formulas. Up to renaming of the letters, the only infinite ternary words avoiding the formula $ABCAB.ABCBA.ACB.BAC$ (resp. $ABCA.BCAB.BCB.CBA$) have the same set of recurrent…
A position $p$ in a word $w$ is critical if the minimal local period at $p$ is equal to the global period of $w$. According to the Critical Factorisation Theorem all words of length at least two have a critical point. We study the number…
An efficient, when compared to exhaustive enumeration, algorithm for computing the number of square-free words of length $n$ over the alphabet $\{a, b, c\}$ is presented.
We show that the number of length-n words over a k-letter alphabet having no even palindromic prefix is the same as the number of length-n unbordered words, by constructing an explicit bijection between the two sets. A slightly different…
Clemm and Trebat-Leder (2014) proved that the number of quadratic number fields with absolute discriminant bounded by $x$ over which there exist elliptic curves with good reduction everywhere and rational $j$-invariant is $\gg…
We show that the set of binary words containing overlaps is not unambiguously context-free and that the set of ternary words containing overlaps is not context-free. We also show that the set of binary words that are not subwords of the…
We study decompositions of words into subwords that are in some sense similar, which means that one subword may be obtained from the other by a relatively simple transformation. Our main inspiration are shuffle squares, an intriguing class…
This paper concerns the avoidability of abelian and additive powers in infinite rich words. In particular, we construct an infinite additive $5$-power-free rich word over $\{0,1\}$ and an infinite additive $4$-power-free rich word over…
Let G be a bridgeless cubic graph. A well-known conjecture of Berge and Fulkerson can be stated as follows: there exist five perfect matchings of G such that each edge of G is contained in at least one of them. Here, we prove that in each…
Carpi (1993) and Lepisto (1994) proved independently that smooth words are cube-free for the alphabet {1, 2}, but nothing is known on whether for the other 2-letter alphabets, smooth words are k-power-free for some suitable positive integer…
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…
Good words are binary words avoiding factors 11 and 1001, and patterns 0000 and 00010100. We show that good words bear the same relationship to the period-doubling sequence that overlap-free words bear to the Thue-Morse sequence. We prove…
We begin a systematic study of the relations between subword complexity of infinite words and their power avoidance. Among other things, we show that -- the Thue-Morse word has the minimum possible subword complexity over all overlap-free…