Savinien Kreczman

Savinien Kreczman, Sébastien Labbé, Manon Stipulanti

Introduced in 2001 by Lecomte and Rigo, abstract numeration systems provide a way of expressing natural numbers with words from a language $L$ accepted by a finite automaton. As it turns out, these numeration systems are not necessarily positional, i.e., we cannot always find a sequence $U=(U_i)_{i\ge 0}$ of integers such that the value of every word in the language $L$ is determined by the position of its letters and the first few values of $U$. Finding the conditions under which an abstract numeration system is positional seems difficult in general. In this paper, we thus consider this question for a particular sub-family of abstract numeration systems called Dumont--Thomas numeration systems. They are derived from substitutions and were introduced in 1989 by Dumont and Thomas. We exhibit conditions on the underlying substitution so that the corresponding Dumont--Thomas numeration is positional. We first work in the most general setting, then particularize our results to some practical cases. Finally, we link our numeration systems to existing literature, notably properties studied by Rényi in 1957, Parry in 1960, Bertrand-Mathis in 1989, and Fabre in 1995

Émilie Charlier, Savinien Kreczman, Zuzana Masáková et al.

Alternate bases are a numeration system that generalizes the Rényi numeration system. It is common in this context to construct examples or counter-examples by specifying the expansions of $1$ in the desired system. While it is easy to show when a system with given expansions of $1$ exists in the Rényi case, the same is not true in the alternate case. In this article, we establish conditions for given words to be the expansions of $1$ in the alternate case. To do so, we use a fixed point theorem on matrices defined from the expansions and obtain the elements of the base from the components of the fixed point. We also obtain a partial result for the uniqueness of such a base. In the latter parts of the article, we use similar techniques to prove the existence of bases with a given sequence of $B$-integers.