In this paper, we construct a uniformly recurrent infinite word of low complexity without uniform frequencies of letters. This shows the optimality of a bound of Boshernitzan, which gives a sufficient condition for a uniformly recurrent infinite word to admit uniform frequencies.

This paper deals with the decidability of semigroup freeness. More precisely, the freeness problem over a semigroup S is defined as: given a finite subset X ⊆ S, decide whether each element of S has at most one factorization over X. To date, the decidabilities of the following two freeness problems have been closely examined. In 1953, Sardinas and Patterson proposed a now famous algorithm for the freeness problem over the free monoids. In 1991, Klarner, Birget and Satterfield proved the undecidability of the freeness problem over three-by-three integer matrices. Both results led to the publication of many subsequent papers. The aim of the present paper is (i) to present general results about freeness problems, (ii) to study the decidability of freeness problems over various particular semigroups (special attention is devoted to multiplicative matrix semigroups), and (iii) to propose precise, challenging open questions in order to promote the study of the topic.

We survey several quantitative problems on infinite words related to repetitions, recurrence, and palindromes, for which the Fibonacci word often exhibits extremal behaviour.

We study some Diophantine properties of automatic real numbers and we present a method to derive irrationality measures for such numbers. As a consequence, we prove that the $b$-adic expansion of a Liouville number cannot be generated by a finite automaton, a conjecture due to Shallit.

Arithmetical complexity of a sequence is the number of words of length n that can be extracted from it according to arithmetic progressions. We study uniformly recurrent words of low arithmetical complexity and describe the family of such words having lowest complexity.

We say that two languages X and Y are conjugates if they satisfy the conjugacy equationXZ = ZY for some language Z. We study several problems associated with this equation. For example, we characterize all sets which are conjugated via a two-element biprefix set Z, as well as all two-element sets which are conjugates.