Context-free grammar for minimal recursive prime factorizations

From papers

Let Drmin\mathcal{D}_{r_{\text{min}}} denote the language of minimal Dyck-word spellings for the recursive prime factorizations of natural numbers. A context-free grammar has nonterminal symbols NN and SS and generates words over the parenthesis alphabet, with productions

Nε,N,NS,N\rightarrow \varepsilon,\qquad N\rightarrow,\qquad N\rightarrow S, SSS,SS,S(S),S().S\rightarrow SS,\qquad S\rightarrow S,\qquad S\rightarrow (S),\qquad S\rightarrow ().

Minimal-spelling grammar conjecture. The language underlying RPFNrmin\text{RPF}_{\mathbb{N}_{r_{\text{min}}}} is generated by this context-free grammar. The grammar is ambiguous, with two shift-reduce conflicts in an LALR parser; resolving both conflicts in favor of shifting was used to verify the minimal spellings of the first thousand natural numbers. The parser evidence does not establish correctness for all natural numbers.

Progress summary

Nothing recorded yet. Refresh searches the literature and the public web for attempts on this problem, and writes the first summary here.

Sources & referencesView supporting material

Primary source

Ralph L. Childress, “Recursive Prime Factorizations: Dyck Words as Numbers”, arXiv:2102.02777 (2026).

Solutions 0

No solutions have been posted yet.