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The purpose of this survey is to present, in contemporary terminology, the fundamental contributions of Axel Thue to the study of combinatorial properties of sequences of symbols, insofar as repetitions are concerned. The present state of the art is also sketched.

Peter Roth proved that there are no binary patterns of length six or more that are unavoidable on the two-letter alphabet. He gave an almost complete description of unavoidable binary patterns. In this paper we prove one of his conjectures: the pattern ff 2 fi 2 ff is 2-avoidable. From this we deduce the complete classification of unavoidable binary patterns. We also study the concept of avoidability by iterated morphisms and prove that there are a few 2-avoidable patterns which are not avoided by any iterated morphism. 1 Introduction The concept of unavoidable pattern was introduced by Bean, Ehrenfeucht & McNulty [2] and independently by Zimin [10]. They gave a characterization of unavoidable patterns, but there is still no characterization of k-unavoidable patterns, i.e. patterns that are unavoidable over a k-letter alphabet. However, we can try to find all k-unavoidable patterns that can be written with a given alphabet. The case of unary patterns (in other terms: powers of a ...