Title
Stability, fragility, and Rota's Conjecture
Abstract
Fix a matroid N. A matroid M is N-fragile if, for each element e of M, at least one of M@?e and M/e has no N-minor. The Bounded Canopy Conjecture is that all GF(q)-representable matroids M that have an N-minor and are N-fragile have branch width bounded by a constant depending only on q and N. A matroid N stabilizes a class of matroids over a field F if, for every matroid M in the class with an N-minor, every F-representation of N extends to at most one F-representation of M. We prove that, if Rota@?s Conjecture is false for GF(q), then either the Bounded Canopy Conjecture is false for GF(q) or there is an infinite chain of GF(q)-representable matroids, each not stabilized by the previous, each of which can be extended to an excluded minor. Our result implies the previously known result that Rota@?s Conjecture holds for GF(4), and that the classes of near-regular and sixth-roots-of-unity matroids have a finite number of excluded minors. However, the bound that we obtain on the size of such excluded minors is considerably larger than that obtained in previous proofs. For GF(5) we show that Rota@?s Conjecture reduces to the Bounded Canopy Conjecture.
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.1016/j.jctb.2011.09.004
Journal of Combinatorial Theory Series B
Keywords
Field
DocType
n. a matroid n,representable matroids,representable matroids m,sixth-roots-of-unity matroids,branch width,matroid n. a matroid,bounded canopy conjecture,matroid m,previous proof,element e,representations,fragility,matroids,roots of unity
Matroid,Discrete mathematics,Combinatorics,Finite set,Rota's conjecture,Fragility,Mathematical proof,Collatz conjecture,Conjecture,Mathematics,Bounded function
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
102
3
0095-8956
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
3
0.48
25
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Dillon Mayhew110218.63
Geoff Whittle247157.57
Stefan H. M. van Zwam3608.60