Related papers: The excluded minors for GF(5)-representable matroi…
A theory of single-element extensions of integer polymatroids analogous to that of matroids is developed. We present an algorithm to generate a catalog of $2$-polymatroids, up to isomorphism. When we implemented this algorithm on a…
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…
We prove that, as $n$ approaches infinity, the proportion of $n$-element matroids that are representable tends to zero.
We provide a new axiom system for flag matroids, characterize representability of uniform flag matroids, and give forbidden minor characterizations of full flag matroids that are representable over $\mathbb{F}_2$ and $\mathbb{F}_3$ along…
The singleton and doubleton minors of a polymatroid $\rho$ encode a surprising amount of information about the structural complexity of $\rho$. Given any polymatroid $\rho$, we can subtract from it a maximally-separated polymatroid,…
The growth-rate function for a minor-closed class $\mathcal{M}$ of matroids is the function $h$ where, for each non-negative integer $r$, $h(r)$ is the maximum number of elements of a simple matroid in $\mathcal{M}$ with rank at most $r$.…
We show for each positive integer $a$ that, if $\cM$ is a minor-closed class of matroids not containing all rank-$(a+1)$ uniform matroids, then there exists an integer $n$ such that either every rank-$r$ matroid in $\cM$ can be covered by…
We study a matrix-based notion of matroid representation over local commutative rings obtained by replacing linear independence with modular independence. This construction always defines an independence system, though not necessarily a…
We prove a conjecture of Geelen, Gerards, and Whittle that for any finite field $GF(q)$ and any integer $t$, every cosimple $GF(q)$-representable matroid with sufficiently large girth contains either $M(K_t)$ or $M(K_t)^*$ as a minor.
We partition in classes the set of matroids of fixed dimension on a fixed vertex set. In each class we identify two special matroids, respectively with minimal and maximal h-vector in that class. Such extremal matroids also satisfy a…
We extend the splitting operation from binary matroids (Raghunathan et al., 1998) to $p$- matroids, where $p$-matroids refer to matroids representable over $GF(p).$ We also characterize circuits, bases, and independent sets of the resulting…
A celebrated result of Seymour is that all regular matroids are built up from graphic matroids, cographic matroids, and a specific 10 element rank 5 matroid called $R_{10}$. In this article, we give a simple description of chip-firing on…
The prism graph is the dual of the complete graph on five vertices with an edge deleted, $K_5\backslash e$. In this paper we determine the class of binary matroids with no prism minor. The motivation for this problem is the 1963 result by…
There exist several theorems which state that when a matroid is representable over distinct fields F_1,...,F_k, it is also representable over other fields. We prove a theorem, the Lift Theorem, that implies many of these results. First,…
We show that a simple rank-$r$ matroid with no $(t+1)$-element independent flat has at least as many elements as the matroid $M_{r,t}$ defined as the direct sum of $t$ binary projective geometries whose ranks pairwise differ by at most $1$.…
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 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…
Mayhew et al.\ (2021) posed the problem of showing that the minor-closed class of spikes and their minors has a finite set of excluded minors and describing all of them. In this paper, we resolve this problem.
We determine the smallest simple triangle-free binary matroids that have no five-element independent flat. This solves a special case of a conjecture of Nelson and Norin.
This article is a survey of matroid theory aimed at algebraic geometers. Matroids are combinatorial abstractions of linear subspaces and hyperplane arrangements. Not all matroids come from linear subspaces; those that do are said to be…