On the Combinatorics of Palindromes and Antipalindromes

We prove a number of results on the structure and enumeration of palindromes and antipalindromes. In particular, we study conjugates of palindromes, palindromic pairs, rich words, and the counterparts of these notions for antipalindromes.Comment: 13 pages/ submitted to DLT 201

Detecting palindromes, patterns, and borders in regular languages

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 consider how long a shortest word can be. The languages L that we examine include the palindromes, the non-palindromes, the k-powers, the non-k-powers, the powers, the non-powers (also called primitive words), the words matching a general pattern, the bordered words, and the unbordered words.Comment: Full version of a paper submitted to LATA 2008. This is a new version with John Loftus added as a co-author and containing new results on unbordered word

Conferences WORDS, years 1997-2017: Open Problems and Conjectures

International audienceIn connection with the development of the field of Combinatorics on Words, we present a list of open problems and conjectures which were stated in the context of the eleven international meetings WORDS, which held from 1997 to 2017

Ten Conferences WORDS: Open Problems and Conjectures

In connection to the development of the field of Combinatorics on Words, we present a list of open problems and conjectures that were stated during the ten last meetings WORDS. We wish to continually update the present document by adding informations concerning advances in problems solving

On morphisms preserving palindromic richness

It is known that each word of length $n$ contains at most $n+1$ distinct palindromes. A finite rich word is a word with maximal number of palindromic factors. The definition of palindromic richness can be naturally extended to infinite words. Sturmian words and Rote complementary symmetric sequences form two classes of binary rich words, while episturmian words and words coding symmetric $d$-interval exchange transformations give us other examples on larger alphabets. In this paper we look for morphisms of the free monoid, which allow to construct new rich words from already known rich words. We focus on morphisms in Class $P_{ret}$. This class contains morphisms injective on the alphabet and satisfying a particular palindromicity property: for every morphism $\varphi$ in the class there exists a palindrome $w$ such that $\varphi(a)w$ is a first complete return word to $w$ for each letter $a$. We characterize $P_{ret}$ morphisms which preserve richness over a binary alphabet. We also study marked $P_{ret}$ morphisms acting on alphabets with more letters. In particular we show that every Arnoux-Rauzy morphism is conjugated to a morphism in Class $P_{ret}$ and that it preserves richness

Combinatorics on Words 10th International Conference

This volume contains the Local Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on WORDS, that took place at the Kiel University, Germany, from the 14th to the 17th September 2015. WORDS is the main conference series devoted to the mathematical theory of words, and it takes place every two years. The first conference in the series was organised in 1997 in Rouen, France, with the following editions taking place in Rouen, Palermo,Turku, Montreal, Marseille, Salerno, Prague, and Turku. The main object in the scope of the conference, words, are finite or infinite sequences of symbols over a finite alphabet. They appear as natural and basic mathematical model in many areas, theoretical or applicative. Accordingly, the WORDS conference is open to both theoretical contributions related to combinatorial, algebraic, and algorithmic aspects of words, as well as to contributions presenting application of the theory of words, for instance, in other fields of computer science, inguistics, biology and bioinformatics, or physics. For the second time in the history of WORDS, after the 2013 edition, a refereed proceedings volume was published in Springer’s Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. In addition, this local proceedings volume was published in the Kiel Computer Science Series of the Kiel University. Being a conference at the border between theoretical computer science and mathematics, WORDS tries to capture in its two proceedings volumes the characteristics of the conferences from both these worlds. While the Lecture Notes in Computer Science volume was dedicated to formal contributions, this local proceedings volume allows, in the spirit of mathematics conferences, the publication of several contributions informing on current research and work in progress in areas closely connected to the core topics of WORDS. All the papers, the ones published in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science proceedings volume or the ones from this volume, were refereed to high standards by the members of the Program Committee. Following the conference, a special issue of the Theoretical Computer Science journal will be edited, containing extended versions of papers from both proceedings volumes. In total, the conference hosted 18 contributed talks. The papers on which 14 of these talks were based, were published in th LNCS volume; the other 4 are published in this volume. In addition to the contributed talks, the conference program included six invited talks given by leading experts in the areas covered by the WORDS conference: Jörg Endrullis (Amsterdam), Markus Lohrey (Siegen), Jean Néraud (Rouen), Dominique Perrin (Paris), Michaël Rao (Lyon), Thomas Stoll (Nancy). WORDS 2015 was the tenth conference in the series, so we were extremely happy to welcome, as invited speaker at this anniversary edition, Jean Néraud, one of the initiators of the series and the main organiser of the first two editions of this conference. We thank all the invited speakers and all the authors of submitted papers for their contributions to the the success of the conference. We are grateful to the members of the Program Committee for their work that lead to the selection of the contributed talks, and, implicitly, of the papers published in this volume. They were assisted in their task by a series of external referees, gratefully acknowledged below. The submission and reviewing process used the Easychair system; we thank Andrej Voronkov for this system which facilitated the work of the Programme Committee and the editors considerably. We grateful thank Gheorghe Iosif for designing the logo, poster, and banner of WORDS 2015; the logo of the conference can be seen on the front cover of this book. We also thank the editors of the Kiel Computer Science Series, especially Lasse Kliemann, for their support in editing this volume. Finally, we thank the Organising Committee of WORDS 2015 for ensuring the smooth run of the conference