A Multidimensional Critical Factorization Theorem

The Critical Factorization Theorem is one of the principal results in combinatorics on words. It relates local periodicities of a word to its global periodicity. In this paper we give a multidimensional extension of it. More precisely, we give a new proof of the Critical Factorization Theorem, but in a weak form, where the weakness is due to the fact that we loose the tightness of the local repetition order. In exchange, we gain the possibility of extending our proof to the multidimensional case. Indeed, this new proof makes use of the Theorem of Fine and Wilf, that has several classical generalizations to the multidimensional cas

Periodicity properties on partial words

The concept of periodicity has played over the years a centra1 role in the development of combinatorics on words and has been a highly valuable too1 for the design and analysis of algorithms. Fine and Wilf’s famous periodicity result, which is one of the most used and known results on words, has extensions to partia1 words, or sequences that may have a number of “do not know” symbols. These extensions fal1 into two categories: the ones that relate to strong periodicity and the ones that relate to weak periodicity. In this paper, we obtain consequences by generalizing, in particular, the combinatoria1 property that “for any word u over {a, b}, ua or ub is primitive,” which proves in some sense that there exist very many primitive partia1 words

Relations on words

In the first part of this survey, we present classical notions arising in combinatorics on words: growth function of a language, complexity function of an infinite word, pattern avoidance, periodicity and uniform recurrence. Our presentation tries to set up a unified framework with respect to a given binary relation. In the second part, we mainly focus on abelian equivalence, $k$-abelian equivalence, combinatorial coefficients and associated relations, Parikh matrices and $M$-equivalence. In particular, some new refinements of abelian equivalence are introduced

String Periods in the Order-Preserving Model

The order-preserving model (op-model, in short) was introduced quite recently but has already attracted significant attention because of its applications in data analysis. We introduce several types of periods in this setting (op-periods). Then we give algorithms to compute these periods in time O(n), O(n log log n), O(n log^2 log n/log log log n), O(n log n) depending on the type of periodicity. In the most general variant the number of different periods can be as big as Omega(n^2), and a compact representation is needed. Our algorithms require novel combinatorial insight into the properties of such periods

Periods and Borders of Random Words

We investigate the behavior of the periods and border lengths of random words over a fixed alphabet. We show that the asymptotic probability that a random word has a given maximal border length k is a constant, depending only on k and the alphabet size l. We give a recurrence that allows us to determine these constants with any required precision. This also allows us to evaluate the expected period of a random word. For the binary case, the expected period is asymptotically about n-1.641. We also give explicit formulas for the probability that a random word is unbordered or has maximum border length one