Cobham's theorem for substitutions

Abstract

The seminal theorem of Cobham has given rise during the last 40 years to a lot of works about non-standard numeration systems and has been extended to many contexts. In this paper, as a result of fifteen years of improvements, we obtain a complete and general version for the so-called substitutive sequences.

Let $\alpha$ and $\beta$ be two multiplicatively independent Perron numbers. Then, a sequence $x\in A^{\mathbb{N}}$, where $A$ is a finite alphabet, is both $\alpha$-substitutive and $\beta$-substitutive if and only if $x$ is ultimately periodic.