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About Duval's Conjecture

Tero Harju, Dirk Nowotka, About Duval's Conjecture. In: Developments in Language Theory (Szeged 2003), Lecture Notes in Computer Science 2710, 316–324, Springer-Verlag, 2003.

Abstract:

<P>A word is called unbordered, if it has no proper prefix
which is also a suffix of that word. Let &micro;(<i>w</i>)
denote the length of the longest unbordered factor
of a word <i>w</i>. Let a word where the longest unbordered
prefix is equal to &micro;(<i>w</i>)
be called Duval extension. A Duval extension is called
trivial, if its longest unbordered factor is of the
length of the period of that Duval extension.

<P>In 1982 it was shown by Duval that every Duval extension <i>w</i>
longer than 3&micro;(<i>w</i>)-4 is trivial. We improve that
bound to 5&micro;(<i>w</i>)/2-1 in this paper, and with that,
move closer to the bound 2&micro;(<i>w</i>) conjectured by Duval.
Our proof also contains a natural application of the
Critical Factorization Theorem.

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BibTeX entry:

@INPROCEEDINGS{inpHaNo03a,
  title = {About Duval's Conjecture},
  booktitle = {Developments in Language Theory (Szeged 2003)},
  author = {Harju, Tero and Nowotka, Dirk},
  volume = {2710},
  series = {Lecture Notes in Computer Science},
  publisher = {Springer-Verlag},
  pages = {316–324},
  year = {2003},
  keywords = {combinatorics on words, Duval's conjecture},
}

Belongs to TUCS Research Unit(s): FUNDIM, Fundamentals of Computing and Discrete Mathematics

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