Mäkelä's conjecture on ternary words with only trivial abelian squares

Let an abelian square be a word of the form uvuv where uu and vv have the same Parikh vector. Consider infinite words over the ternary alphabet Σ3\Sigma_3.

Mäkelä's conjecture. There exists an infinite ternary word whose only abelian square factors are 0000, 1111, and 2222.

The survey states that this conjecture is believed to be true but remains unproved. It contrasts with the known existence of infinite ternary words having only finitely many abelian squares.

Sources & referencesView supporting material

Primary source

Gabriele Fici and Svetlana Puzynina, “Abelian Combinatorics on Words: a Survey”, arXiv:2207.09937 (2022).

Additional references

2 papers in this index state this conjecture (2018–2022). The statement above is taken from the most recent of them; the others are arXiv:1802.04481.

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