Related papers: Vertically N-contractible elements in 3-connected …
In 1977 Stanley conjectured that the $h$-vector of a matroid independence complex is a pure $O$-sequence. In this paper we use lexicographic shellability for matroids to motivate a combinatorial strengthening of Stanley's conjecture. This…
We study arrangements of slightly skewed tropical hyperplanes, called blades by A. Ocneanu, on the vertices of a hypersimplex $\Delta_{k,n}$, and we investigate the resulting induced polytopal subdivisions. We show that placing a blade on a…
A 1965 result of Crapo shows that every elementary lift of a matroid $M$ can be constructed from a linear class of circuits of $M$. In a recent paper, Walsh generalized this construction by defining a rank-$k$ lift of a matroid $M$ given a…
This paper studies systems of polynomial equations that provide information about orientability of matroids. First, we study systems of linear equations over GF(2), originally alluded to by Bland and Jensen in their seminal paper on weak…
Motivated by the study in Morse theory and Smale's work in dynamics, the following questions are studied and answered: (1) When does a 3-manifold admit an automorphism having a knotted Smale solenoid as an attractor? (2) When does a…
Aharoni and Ziv conjectured that if $ M $ and $ N $ are finitary matroids on $ E $, then a certain ``Hall-like'' condition is sufficient to guarantee the existence of an $ M $-independent spanning set of $ N $. We show that their condition…
We prove that for any set $F$ of $n\ge 2$ pairwise disjoint open convex sets in $\mathbb{R}^3$, the connected components of the set of lines intersecting every member of $F$ are contractible. The same result holds for directed lines.
We prove that for each prime power $q$ there is an integer $n$ such that if $M$ is a $3$-connected, representable matroid with a PG$(n-1,q)$-minor and no $U_{2,q^2+1}$-minor, then $M$ is representable over GF$(q)$. We also show that for…
Let AG(3,2)xU(1,1) denote the binary matroid obtained from the direct sum of AG(3,2) and a coloop by completing the 3-point lines between every element in AG(3,2) and the coloop. We prove that every internally 4-connected binary matroid…
We give a characterization of the internally 4-connected binary matroids that have no minor isomorphic to M(K3,3). Any such matroid is either cographic, or is isomorphic to a particular single-element extension of the bond matroid of a…
Let $\mathcal{N}$ be a set of matroids. A matroid $M$ is strictly $\mathcal{N}$-fragile if $M$ has a member of $\mathcal{N}$ as minor and, for all $e \in E(M)$, at least one of $M\backslash e$ and $M/e$ has no minor in $\mathcal{N}$. In…
Let $V$ be a vector space of rectangular $n\times k$ matrices annihilating the Cullis' determinant. We show that $\dim(V) \le (n-1)k$, extending Dieudonn{\'{e}}'s result on the dimension of vector spaces of square matrices annihilating the…
A simple binary matroid is called $I_4$-free if none of its rank-4 flats are independent sets. These objects can be equivalently defined as the sets $E$ of points in $PG(n-1,2)$ for which $|E \cap F|$ is not a basis of $F$ for any…
For a matroid, we define a new simplicial complex whose facets are indexed by its independent sets. This complex contains the external activity complex as a subcomplex. We call our complex the augmented external activity complex since its…
A quadratic lattice $M$ over a Dedekind domain $R$ with fraction field $F$ is defined to be a finitely generated torsion-free $R$-module equipped with a non-degenerate quadratic form on the $F$-vector space $F\otimes_{R}M$. Assuming that…
We consider three forms of composition of matroids, each of which extends the category of bimatroids to a rigid monoidal category. Many well-known constructions are functorial or defined by morphisms in these categories. Motivating examples…
We say that a graph is intrinsically knotted or completely 3-linked if every embedding of the graph into the 3-sphere contains a nontrivial knot or a 3-component link any of whose 2-component sublink is nonsplittable. We show that a graph…
Matroid theory provides a unifying framework for studying dependence across combinatorics, geometry, and applications ranging from rigidity to statistics. In this work, we study circuit varieties of matroids, defined by their minimal…
A class A of labelled graphs is bridge-addable if for all graphs G in A and all vertices u and v in distinct connected components of G, the graph obtained by adding an edge between u and u is also in A; the class A is monotone if for all G…
Let M be a matroid on E, representable over a field of characteristic zero. We show that h-vectors of the following simplicial complexes are log-concave: 1. The matroid complex of independent subsets of E. 2. The broken circuit complex of…