A Mahler's theorem for functions from words to integers

International audienceIn this paper, we prove an extension of Mahler's theorem, a celebrated result of p-adic analysis. Mahler's original result states that a function from N to Z is uniformly continuous for the p-adic metric d_p if and only if it can be uniformly approximated by polynomial functions. We prove the same result for functions from A* to Z, where d_p is now the profinite metric defined by p-groups (pro-p metric)