No Arabic abstract
The present paper records more details of the relationship between primitive elements and palindromes in F_2, the free group of rank two. We characterise the conjugacy classes of primitive elements which contain palindromes as those which contain cyclically reduced words of odd length. We identify large palindromic subwords of certain primitives in conjugacy classes which contain cyclically reduced words of even length. We show that under obvious conditions on exponent sums, pairs of palindromic primitives form palindromic bases for F_2. Further, we note that each cyclically reduced primitive element is either a palindrome, or the concatenation of two palindromes.
A palindromic composition of $n$ is a composition of $n$ which can be read the same way forwards and backwards. In this paper we define an anti-palindromic composition of $n$ to be a composition of $n$ which has no mirror symmetry amongst its parts. We then give a surprising connection between the number of anti-palindromic compositions of $n$ and the so-called tribonacci sequence, a generalization of the Fibonacci sequence. We conclude by defining a new q-analogue of the Fibonacci sequence, which is related to certain equivalence classes of anti-palindromic compositions
We prove that the automorphism group of the braid group on four strands acts faithfully and geometrically on a CAT(0) 2-complex. This implies that the automorphism group of the free group of rank two acts faithfully and geometrically on a CAT(0) 2-complex, in contrast to the situation for rank three and above.
A superdiagonal composition is one in which the $i$-th part or summand is of size greater than or equal to $i$. In this paper, we study the number of palindromic superdiagonal compositions and colored superdiagonal compositions. In particular, we give generating functions and explicit combinatorial formulas involving binomial coefficients and Stirling numbers of the first kind.
We give an algorithm which computes the fixed subgroup and the stable image for any endomorphism of the free group of rank two $F_2$, answering for $F_2$ a question posed by Stallings in 1984 and a question of Ventura.
We investigate the subclass of reversible functions that are self-inverse and relate them to reversible circuits that are equal to their reverse circuit, which are called palindromic circuits. We precisely determine which self-inverse functions can be realized as a palindromic circuit. For those functions that cannot be realized as a palindromic circuit, we find alternative palindromic representations that require an extra circuit line or quantum gates in their construction. Our analyses make use of involutions in the symmetric group $S_{2^n}$ which are isomorphic to self-inverse reversible function on $n$ variables.