English

A counterexample to Las Vergnas' strong map conjecture on realizable oriented matroids

Combinatorics 2019-04-23 v2

Abstract

The Las Vergnas' strong map conjecture, states that any strong map of oriented matroids f:M1M2f:\mathcal{M}_1\rightarrow\mathcal{M}_2 can be factored into extensions and contractions. The conjecture is known to be false due to a construction by Richter-Gebert, he find a non-factorizable strong map f:M1M2f:\mathcal{M}_1\rightarrow\mathcal{M}_2, however in his example M1\mathcal{M}_1 is not realizable. The problem that whether there exists a non-factorizable strong map between realizable oriented matroids still remains open. In this paper we provide a counterexample to the strong map conjecture on realizable oriented matroids, which is a strong map f:M1M2f:\mathcal{M}_1\rightarrow\mathcal{M}_2, M1\mathcal{M}_1 is an alternating oriented matroid of rank 44 and ff has corank 22. We prove it is not factorizable by showing that there is no uniform oriented matroid M\mathcal{M}^{\prime} of rank 33 such that M1MM2\mathcal{M}_1\rightarrow\mathcal{M}^{\prime}\rightarrow\mathcal{M}_2.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1803.06825,
  title  = {A counterexample to Las Vergnas' strong map conjecture on realizable oriented matroids},
  author = {Pei Wu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1803.06825},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

7 pages, update a proof that do not need linear integer programming

R2 v1 2026-06-23T00:57:13.912Z