English

On ternary square-free circular words

Formal Languages and Automata Theory 2010-10-26 v1 Discrete Mathematics Combinatorics

Abstract

Circular words are cyclically ordered finite sequences of letters. We give a computer-free proof of the following result by Currie: square-free circular words over the ternary alphabet exist for all lengths ll except for 5, 7, 9, 10, 14, and 17. Our proof reveals an interesting connection between ternary square-free circular words and closed walks in the K3,3K_{3{,}3} graph. In addition, our proof implies an exponential lower bound on the number of such circular words of length ll and allows one to list all lengths ll for which such a circular word is unique up to isomorphism.

Cite

@article{arxiv.1009.5759,
  title  = {On ternary square-free circular words},
  author = {Arseny M. Shur},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1009.5759},
  year   = {2010}
}

Comments

11 pages, 1 figure, 1 table. Presented at NORCOM'2010, submitted to EJC

R2 v1 2026-06-21T16:20:41.622Z