The Topological Representation Theorem for (oriented) matroids states that every (oriented) matroid can be realized as the intersection lattice of an arrangement of codimension one homotopy spheres on a homotopy sphere. In this paper, we use a construction of Engström to show that structure-preserving maps between matroids induce topological mappings between their representations; a result previously known only in the oriented case. Specifically, we show that weak maps induce continuous maps and that the process is a functor from the category of matroids with weak maps to the homotopy category of topological spaces. We also give a new and conceptual proof of a result regarding the Whitney numbers of the first kind of a matroid.
Swartz proved that any matroid can be realized as the intersection lattice of an arrangement of codimension one homotopy spheres on a sphere. This was an unexpected extension from the oriented matroid case, but unfortunately the construction is not explicit. Anderson later provided an explicit construction, but had to use cell complexes of high dimensions that are homotopy equivalent to lower dimensional spheres. Using diagrams of spaces we give an explicit construction of arrangements in the right dimensions. Swartz asked if it is possible to arrange spheres of codimension two, and we provide…
Using Tutte's combinatorial definition of a map we define a $Δ$-matroid purely combinatorially and show that it is identical to Bouchet's topological definition.
Tropical oriented matroids were defined by Ardila and Develin in 2007 in analogy to (classical) oriented matroids. In this paper we present one tropical analogue for the Topological Representation Theorem.
This paper investigates infinite matroids from a categorical perspective. We prove that the category of infinite matroids is a proto-exact category in the sense of Dyckerhoff and Kapranov, thereby generalizing our previous result on the category of finite matroids. We also characterize finitary matroids as co-limits of finite matroids, and show that the finite matroids are precisely the finitely presentable objects in this category.
Tropical oriented matroids were defined by Ardila and Develin in 2007. They are a tropical analogue of classical oriented matroids in the sense that they encode the properties of the types of points in an arrangement of tropical hyperplanes -- in much the same way as the covectors of (classical) oriented matroids describe the types in arrangements of linear hyperplanes. Ardila and Develin proved that tropical oriented matroids can be represented as mixed subdivisions of dilated simplices. In this paper we show that this correspondence is a bijection. Moreover, a tropical analogue for the Topol…
The Folkman-Lawrence topological representation theorem, which states that every (loop-free) oriented matroid of rank $r$ can be represented as a pseudosphere arrangement on the $(r-1)$-dimensional sphere $S^{r-1}$, is one of the most outstanding results in oriented matroid theory. In this paper, we provide a lower-dimensional version of the topological representation theorem for uniform matroid polytopes of rank $4$. We introduce $2$-weak configurations of points and pseudocircles ($2$-weak PPC configurations) on $S^2$ and prove that every uniform matroid polytope of rank $4$ can be represent…
Bárány, Kalai, and Meshulam recently obtained a topological Tverberg-type theorem for matroids, which guarantees multiple coincidences for continuous maps from a matroid complex to d-dimensional Euclidean space, if the matroid has sufficiently many disjoint bases. They make a conjecture on the connectivity of k-fold deleted joins of a matroid with many disjoint bases, which would yield a much tighter result - but we provide a counterexample already for the case of k=2, where a tight Tverberg-type theorem would be a topological Radon theorem for matroids. Nevertheless, we prove the topological …
The aim of the paper is to clarify the nature of combinatorial structures associated with maps on closed compact surfaces. We prove that maps give rise to Lagrangian matroids representable in a setting provided by cohomology of the surface with punctured points. Our proof is very elementary. We further observe that the greedy algorithm has a natural interpretation in this setting, as a `peeling' procedure which cuts the (connected) surface into a closed ring-shaped peel, and that this procedure is local.
q-Matroids form the q-analogue of classical matroids. In this paper we introduce various types of maps between q-matroids. These maps are not necessarily linear, but they map subspaces to subspaces and respect the q-matroid structure in certain ways. The various types of maps give rise to different categories of q-matroids. We show that only one of these categories possesses a coproduct. This is the category where the morphisms are linear weak maps, that is, the rank of the image of any subspace is not larger than the rank of the subspace itself. The coproduct in this category is the very rece…
We present a new direct proof of a topological representation theorem for oriented matroids in the general rank case. Our proof is based on an earlier rank 3 version. It uses hyperline sequences and the generalized Sch{ö}nflies theorem. As an application, we show that one can read off oriented matroids from arrangements of embedded spheres of codimension one, even if wild spheres are involved.
Las Vergnas introduced several lattice structures on the bases of an ordered matroid M by using their external and internal activities. He also noted that when computing the Moebius function of these lattices, it was often zero, although he had no explanation for that fact. The purpose of this paper is to provide a topological reason for this phenomenon. In particular, we show that the order complex of the external lattice L of M is homotopic to the independence complex of the restriction M^*|T where M^* is the dual of M and T is the top element of L. We then compute some examples showing that…
There is a one-to-one correspondence between geometric lattices and the intersection lattices of arrangements of homotopy spheres. When the arrangements are essential and fully partitioned, Zaslavsky's enumeration of the cells of the arrangement still holds. An application of the theory shows that all minimal cellular resolutions of matroid Steiner ideals are bounded subcomplexes of homotopy sphere arrangements of the given matroid. As a result the Betti numbers of the ideal are computed and seen to be equivalent to Stanley's formula in the special case of face ideals of independence complexes…
For a map $\mathcal M$ cellularly embedded on a connected and closed orientable surface, the bases of its Lagrangian (also known as delta-) matroid $Δ(\mathcal M)$ correspond to the bases of a Lagrangian subspace $L$ of the standard orthogonal space $\mathbb{Q}^E\oplus\mathbb{Q}^{E^*}$, where $E$ and $E^*$ are the edge-sets of $\mathcal M$ and its dual map. The Lagrangian subspace $L$ is said to be a representation of both $\mathcal M$ and $Δ(\mathcal M)$. Furthermore, the bases of $Δ(\mathcal M)$, when understood as vertices of the hypercube $[-1,1]^n$, induce a polytope $\mathbf P(Δ(\mathcal…
We introduce motivic zeta functions for matroids. These zeta functions are defined as sums over the lattice points of Bergman fans, and in the realizable case, they coincide with the motivic Igusa zeta functions of hyperplane arrangements. We show that these motivic zeta functions satisfy a functional equation arising from matroid Poincaré duality in the sense of Adiprasito-Huh-Katz. In the process, we obtain a formula for the Hilbert series of the cohomology ring of a matroid, in the sense of Feichtner-Yuzvinsky. We then show that our motivic zeta functions specialize to the topological zeta …
Morphisms of matroids are combinatorial abstractions of linear maps and graph homomorphisms. We introduce the notion of basis for morphisms of matroids, and show that its generating function is strongly log-concave. As a consequence, we obtain a generalization of Mason's conjecture on the $f$-vectors of independent subsets of matroids to arbitrary morphisms of matroids. To establish this, we define multivariate Tutte polynomials of morphisms of matroids, and show that they are Lorentzian in the sense of [BH19] for sufficiently small positive parameters.
We generalize the Varchenko matrix of a hyperplane arrangement to oriented matroids. We show that the celebrated determinant formula for the Varchenko matrix, first proved by Varchenko, generalizes to oriented matroids. It follows that the determinant only depends on the matroid underlying the oriented matroid and analogous formulas hold for cones in oriented matroids. We follow a proof strategy for the original Varchenko formula first suggested by Denham and Hanlon. Besides several technical lemmas this strategy also requires a topological result on supertopes which is of independent interest…
For any rank $r$ oriented matroid $M$, a construction is given of a "topological representation" of $M$ by an arrangement of homotopy spheres in a simplicial complex which is homotopy equivalent to $S^{r-1}$. The construction is completely explicit and depends only on a choice of maximal flag in $M$. If $M$ is orientable, then all Folkman-Lawrence representations of all orientations of $M$ embed in this representation in a homotopically nice way.
We show that given a finitely generated standard-graded algebra of dimension $d$ over an infinite field, its graded Noether normalizations obey a certain kind of `generic exchange', allowing one to pass between any two of them in at most $d$ steps. We prove analogous generic exchange theorems for minimal reductions of an ideal, minimal complete reductions of a set of ideals, and minimal complete reductions of multigraded $k$-algebras. Finally, we unify all these results into a common axiomatic framework by introducing a new topological-combinatorial structure we call a generic matroid, which i…
In 1993, Csima and Sawyer proved that in a non-pencil arrangement of n pseudolines, there are at least $\frac{6}{13}n$ simple points of intersection. Since pseudoline arrangements are the topological representations of reorientation classes of oriented matroids of rank $3$, in this paper, we will use this result to prove by induction that an oriented paving matroid of rank $r \ge 3$ on $n$ elements, where $n \geq 5+ r$, has at least $\frac{12}{13(r-1)} \binom{n}{r-2}$ independent hyperplanes, yielding a new necessary condition for a paving matroid to be orientable.
To every realizable oriented matroid there corresponds an arrangement of real hyperplanes. The homeomorphism type of the complexified complement of such an arrangement is completely determined by the oriented matroid. In this paper we study arrangements of pseudohyperplanes; they correspond to non-realizable oriented matroids. These arrangements arise as a consequence of the Folkman-Lawrence topological representation theorem. We propose a generalization of the complexification process in this context. In particular we construct a space naturally associated with these pseudo-arrangements which…
The results obtained in this paper grew from an attempt to generalize the main theorem of [1]. There it was shown that any circuit injection (a 1-1 onto edge map f such that if C is a circuit then f(C) is a circuit) from a 3-connected, not necessarily finite graph G onto a graph H is induced by a vertex isomorphism, where H is assumed to not have any isolated vertices. In the present article we examine the situation when the 1-1 condition is dropped (Chapter 1). An interesting result then is that the theorem remains true for finite (3-connected) graphs G but not for infinite G. In Chapter 2 we…
In this article we introduce a new matroid invariant, a combinatorial analog of the topological zeta function of a polynomial. More specifically we associate to any ranked, atomic meet-semilattice L a rational function Z(L,s), in such a way that when L is the lattice of flats of a complex hyperplane arrangement we recover the usual topological zeta function. The definition is in terms of a choice of a combinatorial analog of resolution of singularities, and the main result is that Z(L,s) does not depend on this choice and depends only on L. Known properties of the topological zeta function pro…
In a previous work, we gave a construction of (not necessarily realizable) oriented matroids from a triangulation of a product of two simplices. In this follow-up paper, we use a variant of Viro's patchworking to derive a topological representation of the oriented matroid directly from the polyhedral structure of the triangulation, hence finding a combinatorial manifestation of patchworking besides tropical algebraic geometry. We achieve this by rephrasing the patchworking procedure as a controlled cell merging process, guided by the structure of tropical oriented matroids. A key insight is a …
Many combinatorial properties of a point set in the plane are determined by the set of possible partitions of the point set by a line. Their essential combinatorial properties are well captured by the axioms of oriented matroids. In fact, Goodman and Pollack (Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series A, Volume 37, pp. 257-293, 1984) proved that the axioms of oriented matroids of rank $3$ completely characterize the sets of possible partitions arising from a natural topological generalization of configurations of points and lines. In this paper, we introduce a new class of oriented matroids, call…
Department of Mathematics, Creighton University（克里顿大学数学系）；Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Boston University（波士顿大学数学与统计系）；Department of Mathematics, Florida Atlantic University（佛罗里达大西洋大学数学系）
Using equivariant obstruction theory we construct equivariant maps from certain classifying spaces to representation spheres for cyclic groups, product of elementary Abelian groups and dihedral groups. Restricting them to finite skeleta constructs equivariant maps between spaces which are related to the topological Tverberg conjecture. This answers negatively a question of Özaydin posed in relation to weaker versions of the same conjecture. Further, it also has consequences for Borsuk-Ulam properties of representations of cyclic and dihedral groups.
Cone and constrained colorful Carathéodory Theorems
Freie Universität Berlin（柏林自由大学）；Mat. Institut SANU（塞尔维亚科学与艺术学院数学研究所）；Institute for Information Transmission Problems RAS（俄罗斯科学院信息传输问题研究所）；Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology（莫斯科物理技术学院）
Haviv ({\em European Journal of Combinatorics}, 2019) has recently proved that some topological lower bounds on the chromatic number of graphs are also lower bounds on their orthogonality dimension over $\mathbb{R}$. We show that this holds actually for all known topological lower bounds and all fields. We also improve the topological bound he obtained for the minrank parameter over $\mathbb{R}$ -- an important graph invariant from coding theory -- and show that this bound is actually valid for all fields as well. The notion of independent representation over a matroid is introduced and used i…
$k$-point crossover operators and their recombination sets are studied from different perspectives. We show that transit functions of $k$-point crossover generate, for all $k>1$, the same convexity as the interval function of the underlying graph. This settles in the negative an open problem by Mulder about whether the geodesic convexity of a connected graph $G$ is uniquely determined by its interval function $I$. The conjecture of Gitchoff and Wagner that for each transit set $R_k(x,y)$ distinct from a hypercube there is a unique pair of parents from which it is generated is settled affirmati…
