Lyndon Words, Free Algebras and Shuffles

Abstract

A Lyndon word is a primitive word which is minimum in its conjugation class, for the lexicographical ordering. These words have been introduced by Lyndon in order to find bases of the quotients of the lower central series of a free group or, equivalently, bases of the free Lie algebra [2], [7]. They have also many combinatorial properties, with applications to semigroups, pi-rings and pattern-matching, see [1], [10].We study here the Poincaré-Birkhoff-Witt basis constructed on the Lyndon basis (PBWL basis). We give an algorithm to write each word in this basis: it reads the word from right to left, and the first encountered inversion is either bracketted, or straightened, and this process is iterated: the point is to show that each bracketting is a standard one: this we show by introducing a loop invariant (property (S)) of the algorithm. This algorithm has some analogy with the collecting process of P. Hall [5], but was never described for the Lyndon basis, as far we know.