Two words u and v are said to be k-abelian equivalent if, for each word x of length at most k, the number of occurrences of x as a factor of u is the same as for v. We study some combinatorial properties of k-abelian equivalence classes. Our starting point is a characterization of k-abelian equival ence by rewriting, so-called k-switching. Using this characterization we show that, over any fixed alphabet, the language of lexicographically least representatives of k-abelian equivalence classes is a regular language. From this we infer that the sequence of the numbers of equivalence classes is ℕ-rational. Furthermore, we show that the above sequence is asymptotically equal to a certain polynomial depending on k and the alphabet size.

We characterize pairs of complementary nonhomogeneous Beatty sequences $(A_n)_{n>0}$ and $(B_n)_{n>0}$, with the restriction $A_1=1$ and $B_1\geq 3$, for which there exists an invariant take-away game having $\{(A_n,B_n),(B_n,A_n)\mid n> 0\}\cup\{(0,0)\}$ as a set of $P$-positions. Using the notion of a Sturmian word arising in combinatorics on words, this characterization can be translated into a decision procedure relying only on a few algebraic tests about algebraicity or rational independence. This work partially answers to a question of Larsson, Hegarty, and Fraenkel, raised in [Theoret. Comput. Sci., 412 (2011), pp. 729--735].

We show that there exists an infinite word over the alphabet {0, 1, 3, 4} containing no three consecutive blocks of the same size and the same sum. This answers an open problem of Pirillo and Varricchio from 1994.

In dimension 1, the theorem of Morse and Hedlund links periodicity and low complexity. In higher dimension, finding such a link is a challenging problem. We present recent results in this direction.