ELibM mirror of EPTCS 63

A Classification of Trapezoidal Words

Gabriele Fici
(Laboratoire I3S, CNRS and Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis)

Trapezoidal words are finite words having at most n+1 distinct factors of length n, for every n>=0. They encompass finite Sturmian words. We distinguish trapezoidal words into two disjoint subsets: open and closed trapezoidal words. A trapezoidal word is closed if its longest repeated prefix has exactly two occurrences in the word, the second one being a suffix of the word. Otherwise it is open. We show that open trapezoidal words are all primitive and that closed trapezoidal words are all Sturmian. We then show that trapezoidal palindromes are closed (and therefore Sturmian). This allows us to characterize the special factors of Sturmian palindromes. We end with several open problems.

In Petr Ambrož, Štěpán Holub and Zuzana Masáková: Proceedings 8th International Conference Words 2011 (WORDS 2011), Prague, Czech Republic, 12-16th September 2011, Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science 63, pp. 129–137.
Published: 17th August 2011.

ArXived at: http://dx.doi.org/10.4204/EPTCS.63.18 bibtex PDF
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