Related papers: Palindromic Prefixes and Episturmian Words
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…
It is a fundamental property of non-letter Lyndon words that they can be expressed as a concatenation of two shorter Lyndon words. This leads to a naive lower bound log_{2}(n)} + 1 for the number of distinct Lyndon factors that a Lyndon…
We introduce and study natural derivatives for Christoffel and finite standard words, as well as for characteristic Sturmian words. These derivatives, which are realized as inverse images under suitable morphisms, preserve the…
Given a language L and a nondeterministic finite automaton M, we consider whether we can determine efficiently (in the size of M) if M accepts at least one word in L, or infinitely many words. Given that M accepts at least one word in L, we…
Lambda words are sequences obtained by encoding the differences between ordered elements of the form i+j\theta, where i and j are non-negative integers and 1 < \theta <2. Lambda words are right-infinite words defined over an infinite…
Central, standard, and Christoffel words are three strongly interrelated classes of binary finite words which represent a finite counterpart of characteristic Sturmian words. A natural arithmetization of the theory is obtained by…
Fix two words over the binary alphabet $\{0,1\}$, and generate iid Bernoulli$(p)$ bits until one of the words occurs in sequence. This setup, commonly known as Penney's ante, was popularized by Conway, who found (in unpublished work) a…
In combinatorics on words, a word w of length n over an alphabet of size q is said to be privileged if n <= 1 or if n >= 2 and w has a privileged border that occurs exactly twice in w. Forsyth, Jayakumar and Shallit proved that there exist…
Generalizing the notion of the boundary sequence introduced by Chen and Wen, the $n$th term of the $\ell$-boundary sequence of an infinite word is the finite set of pairs $(u,v)$ of prefixes and suffixes of length $\ell$ appearing in…
A gapped repeat (respectively, palindrome) occurring in a word $w$ is a factor $uvu$ (respectively, $u^Rvu$) of $w$. In such a repeat (palindrome) $u$ is called the arm of the repeat (respectively, palindrome), while $v$ is called the gap.…
We study the notion of quasiperiodicity, in the sense of "coverability", for biinfinite words. All previous work about quasiperiodicity focused on right infinite words, but the passage to the biinfinite case could help to prove stronger…
A finite word is closed if it contains a factor that occurs both as a prefix and as a suffix but does not have internal occurrences, otherwise it is open. We are interested in the {\it oc-sequence} of a word, which is the binary sequence…
It is known that binary words containing no $k$ consecutive 1s are enumerated by $k$-step Fibonacci numbers. In this note we discuss the expected value of a random bit in a random word of length $n$ having this property.
A two-dimensional ($2$D) word is a $2$D palindrome if it is equal to its reverse and it is an HV-palindrome if all its columns and rows are $1$D palindromes. We study some combinatorial and structural properties of HV-palindromes and its…
In 2011, Fici and Lipt\'ak introduced prefix normal words. A binary word is prefix normal if it has no factor (substring) that contains more occurrences of the letter 1 than the prefix of the same length. Among the open problems regarding…
Let $A_q$ be a $q$-letter alphabet and $w$ be a right infinite word on this alphabet. A subword of $w$ is a block of consecutive letters of $w$. The subword complexity function of $w$ assigns to each positive integer $n$ the number $f_w(n)$…
We study Fibonacci compositions, which are compositions of natural numbers that only use Fibonacci numbers, in two different contexts. We first prove inequalities comparing the number of Fibonacci compositions to regular compositions where…
The avoidability, or unavoidability of patterns in words over finite alphabets has been studied extensively. A word (pattern) over a finite set is said to be unavoidable if, for all but finitely many words, there exists a morphism mapping…
A \emph{palindrome} is a word that reads the same forwards and backwards. A \emph{block palindrome factorization} (or \emph{BP-factorization}) is a factorization of a word into blocks that becomes palindrome if each identical block is…
We study the properties of the sequence of words $(B_i)$, where $B_1 = 101$ and $B_{i+1} = B_i C_i$ for $i \geq 1$, where $C_i$ is $B_i$ with the first $i$ symbols removed, and the infinite binary sequence ${\bf b} = 10101101011011101…