Tero Harju and Dirk Nowotka
Counting Bordered and Primitive Words with a Fixed Weight


Theoretical Computer Science, 340(2):273-279, 2005.

Abstract

A word w is primitive if it is not a proper power of another word, and w is unbordered if it has no prefix that is also a suffix of w. We study the number of primitive and unbordered words w with a fixed weight, that is, words for which the Parikh vector of w is a fixed vector. Moreover, we estimate the number of words that have a unique border.

Keywords: combinatorics on words, borders, primitive words

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