In this paper, we study certain pairings which are defined as follows: if A and B are finite subsets of an arbitrary group, a Wakeford–Fan–Losonczy pairing from B onto A is a bijection φ : B → A such that bφ(b) ∉ A, for every b ∈ B. The number of such pairings is denoted by μ(B, A).

We investigate the quantity μ(B, A) for A and B, two finite subsets of an arbitrary group satisfying 1 ∉ B, |A| = |B|, and the fact that the order of every element of B is ≥ |B| + 1. Extending earlier results, we show that in this case, μ(B, A) is never equal to 0. Furthermore we prove an explicit lower bound on μ(B, A) in terms of |B| and the cardinality of the group generated by B, which is valid unless A and B have a special form explicitly described. In the case A = B, our bound holds unless B is a translate of a progression.

We present a simple graph integral equivalent to a multiple of the circuit partition polynomial. Let G be a directed graph, and let k be a positive integer. Associate with each vertex v of G an independent, uniformly random k-dimensional complex vector xv of unit length. We define q(G;k) to be the expected value of the product, over all edges (u, v), of the inner product 〈xu, xv〉. We show that q(G;k) is proportional to G's cycle partition polynomial, and therefore that computing q(G;k) is #P-complete for any k > 1. We also study the natural variants that arise when the xv are real or drawn from the Gaussian distribution.

In this work we give a study of generalizations of Stirling permutations, a restricted class of permutations of multisets introduced by Gessel and Stanley [15]. First we give several bijections between such generalized Stirling permutations and various families of increasing trees extending the known correspondences of [20, 21]. Then we consider several permutation statistics of interest for generalized Stirling permutations as the number of left-to-right minima, the number of left-to-right maxima, the number of blocks of specified sizes, the distance between occurrences of elements, and the number of inversions. For all these quantities we give a distributional study, where the established connections to increasing trees turn out to be very useful. To obtain the exact and limiting distribution results we use several techniques ranging from generating functions, connections to urn models, martingales and Stein's method.

The repetition threshold introduced by Dejean and Brandenburg is the smallest real number α such that there exists an infinite word over a k-letter alphabet that avoids β-powers for all β > α. We extend this notion to colored graphs and obtain the value of the repetition thresholds of trees and “large enough” subdivisions of graphs for every alphabet size.

The (−β)-integers are natural generalisations of theβ-integers, and thus of the integers, for negative real bases. Whenβ is the analogue of a Parry number, we describe the structure of theset of (−β)-integers by a fixed point of an anti-morphism.

We study cooperating distributed systems (CD-systems) of stateless deterministicrestarting automata with window size 1 that are equipped with an external pushdown store.In this way we obtain an automata-theoretical characterization for the class of wordlanguages that are linearizations of context-free trace languages.

We obtain a first non-trivial estimate for the sum of dilates problem in the case of groups of prime order, by showing that if t is an integer different from 0, 1 or −1 and if ⊂ ℤ/pℤ is not too large (with respect to p), then | + t ⋅ | is significantly larger than 2|| (unless |t| = 3). In the important case |t| = 2, we obtain for instance | + t ⋅ | ≥ 2.08 ||−2.

Plünnecke's inequality is a standard tool for obtaining estimates on the cardinality of sumsets and has many applications in additive combinatorics. We present a new proof. The main novelty is that the proof is completed with no reference to Menger's theorem or Cartesian products of graphs. We also investigate the sharpness of the inequality and show that it can be sharp for arbitrarily long, but not for infinite commutative graphs. A key step in our investigation is the construction of arbitrarily long regular commutative graphs. Lastly we prove a necessary condition for the inequality to be attained.

We consider the problem of selecting sequentially a unimodal subsequence from a sequence of independent identically distributed random variables, and we find that a person doing optimal sequential selection does so within a factor of the square root of two as well as a prophet who knows all of the random observations in advance of any selections. Our analysis applies in fact to selections of subsequences that have d+1 monotone blocks, and, by including the case d=0, our analysis also covers monotone subsequences.

We prove that some fairly basic questions on automata reading infinite words depend on the models of the axiomatic system ZFC. It is known that there are only three possibilities for the cardinality of the complement of an ω-language \hbox{$L(\mathcal{A})$}L(𝒜) accepted by a Büchi 1-counter automaton \hbox{$\mathcal{A}$}𝒜. We prove the following surprising result: there exists a 1-counter Büchi automaton \hbox{$\mathcal{A}$}𝒜 such that the cardinality of the complement \hbox{$L(\mathcal{A})^-$}L(𝒜) −  of the ω-language \hbox{$L(\mathcal{A})$}L(𝒜) is not determined by ZFC: (1) There is a model V1 of ZFC in which \hbox{$L(\mathcal{A})^-$}L(𝒜) −  is countable. (2) There is a model V2 of ZFC in which \hbox{$L(\mathcal{A})^-$}L(𝒜) −  has cardinal 2ℵ0. (3) There is a model V3 of ZFC in which \hbox{$L(\mathcal{A})^-$}L(𝒜) −  has cardinal ℵ1 with ℵ0 < ℵ1 < 2ℵ0.

We prove a very similar result for the complement of an infinitary rational relation accepted by a 2-tape Büchi automaton ℬ. As a corollary, this proves that the continuum hypothesis may be not satisfied for complements of 1-counter ω-languages and for complements of infinitary rational relations accepted by 2-tape Büchi automata. We infer from the proof of the above results that basic decision problems about 1-counter ω-languages or infinitary rational relations are actually located at the third level of the analytical hierarchy. In particular, the problem to determine whether the complement of a 1-counter ω-language (respectively, infinitary rational relation) is countable is in Σ13\(Π12 ∪ Σ12). This is rather surprising if compared to the fact that it is decidable whether an infinitary rational relation is countable (respectively, uncountable).

We show that there are graphs with n vertices containing no K5,5 which have about n7/4 edges, thus proving that ex(n, K5,5) ≥ (1 + o(1))n7/4. This bound gives an asymptotic improvement to the known lower bounds on ex(n, Kt, s) for t = 5 when 5 ≤ s ≤ 12, and t = 6 when 6 ≤ s ≤ 8.

The bandwidth minimization problem is of significance in network communication and related areas. Let G be a graph of n vertices. The two-dimensional bandwidth B2(G) of G is the minimum value of the maximum distance between adjacent vertices when G is embedded into an n × n grid in the plane. As a discrete optimization problem, determining B2(G) is NP-hard in general. However, exact results for this parameter can be derived for some special classes of graphs. This paper studies the “square-root rule” of the two-dimensional bandwidth, which is useful in evaluating B2(G) for some typical graphs.

In the paper we study abelian versions of the critical factorization theorem. We investigate both similarities and differences between the abelian powers and the usual powers. The results we obtained show that the constraints for abelian powers implying periodicity should be quite strong, but still natural analogies exist.