Enumeration of m-Endomorphisms

Abstract

An m-endomorphism of a free semigroup is an endomorphism that sends every generator to a word of length at most m. Two m-endomorphisms are combinatorially equivalent if they are conjugate under an automorphism of the semigroup. In this paper, we specialize an argument of N. G. de Bruijn to produce a formula for the number of combinatorial equivalence classes of m-endomorphisms on a rank-n semigroup. From this formula, we derive several little-known integer sequences.

arXiv commentTo appear in Involve: A Journal of Mathematics