We present an infinite family of formulas with reversal whose avoidability index is bounded between 4 and 5, and we show that several members of the family have avoidability index 5. This family is particularly interesting ...

Ochem, Rampersad, and Shallit gave various examples of infinite words avoiding what they called approximate repetitions. An approximate repetition is a factor of the form x x', where x and x' are close to being identical. ...

We answer a question of Harju: For every n ≥ 3 there is a square-free ternary word of length n with a square-free self-shuffle.

Given an infinite word x over an alphabet A, a letter b occurring in x, and a total order \sigma on A, we call the smallest word with respect to \sigma starting with b in the shift orbit closure of x an extremal word of ...

For every pattern p over the alphabet {x,x^R,y,y^R}, we specify the least k such that p is k-avoidable.

We study the combinatorics of vtm, a variant of the Thue-Morse word generated by the non-uniform morphism 0 ↦ 012, 1 ↦ 02, 2 ↦ 1 starting with 0. This infinite ternary sequence appears a lot in the literature and finds ...

We prove that the subsets of Nd that are S-recognizable for all abstract numeration systems S are exactly the 1-recognizable sets. This generalizes a result of Lecomte and Rigo in the one-dimensional setting.

A cyclically t-complementary k-hypergraph is a k-uniform hypergraph with vertex set V and edge set E for which there exists a permutation 2 Sym.V/ such that the sets E; E ; E 2; : : : ; E t􀀀1 partition the set of all ...

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 ...

We consider various shuffling and unshuffling operations on languages and words, and examine their closure properties. Although the main goal is to provide some good and novel exercises and examples for undergraduate formal ...