English

On 2-partitionable clutters and the MFMC property

Commutative Algebra 2008-06-12 v1

Abstract

We introduce 2-partitionable clutters as the simplest case of the class of kk-partitionable clutters and study some of their combinatorial properties. In particular, we study properties of the rank of the incidence matrix of these clutters and properties of their minors. A well known conjecture of Conforti and Cornu\'ejols \cite{ConfortiCornuejols,cornu-book} states: That all the clutters with the packing property have the max-flow min-cut property, i.e. are mengerian. Among the general classes of clutters known to verify the conjecture are: balanced clutters (Fulkerson, Hoffman and Oppenheim \cite{FulkersonHoffmanOppenheim}), binary clutters (Seymour \cite{Seymour}) and dyadic clutters (Cornu\'ejols, Guenin and Margot \cite{CornuejolsGueninMargot}). We find a new infinite family of 2-partitionable clutters, that verifies the conjecture. On the other hand we are interested in studying the normality of the Rees algebra associated to a clutter and possible relations with the Conforti and Cornu\'ejols conjecture. In fact this conjecture is equivalent to an algebraic statement about the normality of the Rees algebra \cite{rocky}.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0806.1772,
  title  = {On 2-partitionable clutters and the MFMC property},
  author = {Alejandro Flores-Méndez and Isidoro Gitler and Enrique Reyes},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0806.1772},
  year   = {2008}
}

Comments

18 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-21T10:49:23.732Z