Permuting operations on strings and the distribution of their prime numbers

Abstract

Several ways of interleaving, as studied in theoretical computer science, and some subjects from mathematics can be modeled by length-preserving operations on strings, that only permute the symbol positions in strings. Each such operation X gives rise to a family {Xn}n≥2} of similar permutations. We call an integer n X-prime if Xn consists of a single cycle of length n(n≥2). For some instances of X - such as shuffle, twist, operations based on the Archimedes' spiral and on the Josephus problem - we investigate the distribution of X-primes and of the associated (ordinary) prime numbers, which leads to variations of some well-known conjectures in number theory