We study in this thesis several problems related to commutation on sets of words and on formal power series. We investigate the notion of semilinearity for formal power series in commuting variables, introducing two families of series - the semilinear and the bounded series - both natural generalizations of the semilinear languages, and we study their behaviour under rational operations, morphisms, Hadamard product, and difference. Turning to commutation on sets of words, we then study the notions of centralizer of a language - the largest set commuting with a language -, of root and of primitive root of a set of words. We answer a question raised by Conway more than thirty years ago - asking whether or not the centralizer of any rational language is rational - in the case of periodic, binary, and ternary sets of words, as well as for rational c-codes, the most general results on this problem. We also prove that any code has a unique primitive root and that two codes commute if and only if they have the same primitive root, thus solving two conjectures of Ratoandromanana, 1989. Moreover, we prove that the commutation with an c-code X can be characterized similarly as in free monoids: a language commutes with X if and only if it is a union of powers of the primitive root of X.

The centralizer of a set of words X is the largest set of words C(X) commuting with X: XC(X) = C(X)X. It has been a long standing open question due to Conway, 1971, whether the centralizer of any rational set is rational. While the answer turned out to be negative in general, see Kunc 2004, we prove here that the situation is different for codes: the centralizer of any rational code is rational and if the code is finite, then the centralizer is finitely generated. This result has been previously proved only for binary and ternary sets of words in a series of papers by the authors and for prefix codes in an ingenious paper by Ratoandromanana 1989 – many of the techniques we use in this paper follow her ideas. We also give in this paper an elementary proof for the prefix case. Key words: Codes, Commutation, Centralizer, Conway’s problem, Prefix codes. 1