English

Unavoidable Minors of Matroids with Minimum Cocircuit Size Four

Combinatorics 2025-07-15 v1

Abstract

In 1963, Halin and Jung proved that every simple graph with minimum degree at least four has K5K_5 or K2,2,2K_{2,2,2} as a minor. Mills and Turner proved an analog of this theorem by showing that every 33-connected binary matroid in which every cocircuit has size at least four has F7,M(K3,3),M(K5),F_7, M^*(K_{3,3}), M(K_5), or M(K2,2,2) M(K_{2,2,2}) as a minor. Generalizing these results, this paper proves that every simple matroid in which all cocircuits have at least four elements has as a minor one of nine matroids, seven of which are well known. All nine of these special matroids have rank at most five and have at most twelve elements.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2507.09015,
  title  = {Unavoidable Minors of Matroids with Minimum Cocircuit Size Four},
  author = {Matthew Mizell and James Oxley},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.09015},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

35 pages

R2 v1 2026-07-01T03:57:25.451Z