We compare two sets of (infinite) binary sequences whose suffixes satisfy extremal conditions: one occurs when studying iterations of unimodal continuous maps from the unit interval into itself, but it also characterizes univoque real numbers; the other is a disguised version of the set of characteristic Sturmian sequences. As a corollary to our study we obtain that a real number β in (1,2) is univoque and self-Sturmian if and only if the β-expansion of 1 is of the form 1v, where v is a characteristic Sturmian sequence beginning itself in 1.

Let $\mathcal{L}$ be a language. A balanced pair (u,v) consists of two words u and v in $\mathcal{L}$ which have the same number of occurrences of each letter. It is irreducible if the pairs of strict prefixes of u and v of the same length do not form balanced pairs. In this article, we are interested in computing the set of irreducible balanced pairs on several cases of languages. We make connections with the balanced pairs algorithm and discrete geometrical constructions related to substitutive languages. We characterize substitutive languages which have infinitely many irreducible balanced pairs of a given form.

In this paper, we solve some open problems related to (pseudo)palindrome closure operators and to the infinite words generated by their iteration, that is, standard episturmian and pseudostandard words. We show that if ϑ is an involutory antimorphism of A*, then the right and left ϑ-palindromic closures of any factor of a ϑ-standard word are also factors of some ϑ-standard word. We also introduce the class of pseudostandard words with “seed”, obtained by iterated pseudopalindrome closure starting from a nonempty word. We show that pseudostandard words with seed are morphic images of standard episturmian words. Moreover, we prove that for any given pseudostandard word s with seed, all sufficiently long left special factors of s are prefixes of it.

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

We first prove an extremal property of the infinite Fibonacci* word f: the family of the palindromic prefixes {hn | n ≥ 6} of f is not only a circular code but “almost” a comma-free one (see Prop. 12 in Sect. 4). We also extend to a more general situation the notion of a necklace introduced for the study of trinucleotides codes on the genetic alphabet, and we present a hierarchy relating two important classes of codes, the comma-free codes and the circular ones.

The LS (Look and Say) derivative of a word is obtained by writing the number of consecutive equal letters when the word is spelled from left to right. For example, LS( 1 1 2 3 3) = 2 1 1 2 2 3 (two 1, one 2, two 3). We start the study of the behaviour of binary words generated by morphisms under the LS operator, focusing in particular on the Fibonacci word.

In this paper, we characterize the substitutions over a three-letter alphabet which generate a ultimately periodic sequence.