College Algebra

This five-part book begins with a section on basics that covers terminology, the compatibility of partial words, and combinatorial properties of words. The book then focuses on three important concepts of periodicity on partial words: period, weak period, and local period. The next part describes a linear time algorithm to test primitivity on partial words and extends the results on unbordered words to unbordered partial words while the following section introduces some important properties of pcodes, details a variety of ways of defining and analyzing pcodes, and shows that the pcode property is decidable using two different techniques. In the final part, the author solves various equations on partial words, presents binary and ternary correlations, and covers unavoidable sets of partial words.

Setting the tone for future research in this field, this book lucidly develops the central ideas and results of combinatorics on partial words.