Related papers: Detecting minors in matroids through triangles

A matroid $N$ is said to be triangle-rounded in a class of matroids $\mathcal{M}$ if each $3$-connected matroid $M\in \mathcal{M}$ with a triangle $T$ and an $N$-minor has an $N$-minor with $T$ as triangle. Reid gave a result useful to…

In 1963, Halin and Jung proved that every simple graph with minimum degree at least four has $K_5$ or $K_{2,2,2}$ as a minor. Mills and Turner proved an analog of this theorem by showing that every $3$-connected binary matroid in which…

In earlier work, we characterized the class of matroids with no $M(C_4)$ as an induced minor and the class of matroids with no member of $\{M(C_4),M(K_4)\}$ as an induced minor. In this paper, for every two matroids in…

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…

In this sequel to "Foundations of matroids - Part 1", we establish several presentations of the foundation of a matroid in terms of small building blocks. For example, we show that the foundation of a matroid M is the colimit of the…

In this paper, we investigate three problems concerning the toric ideal associated to a matroid. Firstly, we list all matroids $\mathcal M$ such that its corresponding toric ideal $I_{\mathcal M}$ is a complete intersection. Secondly, we…

Consider a random $n\times m$ matrix $A$ over the finite field of order $q$ where every column has precisely $k$ nonzero elements, and let $M[A]$ be the matroid represented by $A$. In the case that q=2, Cooper, Frieze and Pegden (RS\&A…

Let M and N be internally 4-connected binary matroids such that M has a proper N-minor, and |E(N)| is at least seven. As part of our project to develop a splitter theorem for internally 4-connected binary matroids, we prove the following…

We consider some applications of our characterisation of the internally 4-connected binary matroids with no M(K3,3)-minor. We characterise the internally 4-connected binary matroids with no minor in some subset of…

For a matroid $M$, an element $e$ such that both $M\backslash e$ and $M/e$ are regular is called a regular element of $M$. We determine completely the structure of non-regular matroids with at least two regular elements. Besides four small…

A flat cover is a collection of flats identifying the non-bases of a matroid. We introduce the notion of cover complexity, the minimal size of such a flat cover, as a measure for the complexity of a matroid, and present bounds on the number…

The class of 2-regular matroids is a natural generalisation of regular and near-regular matroids. We prove an excluded-minor characterisation for the class of 2-regular matroids. The class of 3-regular matroids coincides with the class of…

Let ${\bf A}={\bf A}_{n,m,k}$ be a random $n\times m$ matrix over $\mathbf{GF}_2$ wher each column consists of $k$ randomly chosen ones. Let $M$ be an arbirary fixed binary matroid. We show that if $m/n$ and $k$ are sufficiently large then…

We show that almost every matroid contains the rank-3 whirl $\mathcal{W}^3$ or the complete-graphic matroid $M(K_4)$ as a minor.

If $M$ is a matroid, then a simple matroid $M'$ with the same rank as $M$ is an adjoint of $M$ if there is an inclusion-reversing embedding $\phi$ of the lattice of flats of $M$ into the lattice of flats of $M'$ such that $\phi$ maps the…

Our splitter theorem for internally 4-connected binary matroids studies pairs of the form (M,N), where N and M are internally 4-connected binary matroids, M has a proper N-minor, and if M' is an internally 4-connected matroid such that M…

For any minor-closed class of matroids over a fixed finite field, we state an exact structural characterization for the sufficiently connected matroids in the class. We also state a number of conjectures that might be approachable using the…

We prove that, for each nonnegative integer k and each matroid N, if M is a 3-connected matroid containing N as a minor, and the the branch width of M is sufficiently large, then there is a k-element subset X of E(M) such that one of M\X…

A result of Seymour implies that any 3-connected matroid with a modular 3-point line is binary. We prove a similar characterization for 3-connected matroids with modular 4-point lines. We show that such a matroid is either representable…

If S is a set of matroids, then the matroid M is S-fragile if, for every element e in E(M), either M\e or M/e has no minor isomorphic to a member of S. Excluded-minor characterizations often depend, implicitly or explicitly, on…