Lyndon Words, the Three Squares Lemma, and Primitive Squares
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We revisit the so-called "Three Squares Lemma" by Crochemore and Rytter [Algorithmica 1995] and, using arguments based on Lyndon words, derive a more general variant which considers three overlapping squares which do not necessarily share a common prefix. We also give an improved upper bound of nlog_2 n on the maximum number of (occurrences of) primitively rooted squares in a string of length n, also using arguments based on Lyndon words. To the best of our knowledge, the only known upper bound was n log_ϕ n ≈ 1.441nlog_2 n, where ϕ is the golden ratio, reported by Fraenkel and Simpson [TCS 1999] obtained via the Three Squares Lemma.
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