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Regular Round Matroids, Svetlana Borissova

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

A matroid M is a finite set E, called the ground set of M, together with a notion of what it means for subsets of E to be independent. Some matroids, called regular matroids, have the property that all elements in their ground set can be represented by vectors over any field. A matroid is called round if its dual has no two disjoint minimal dependent sets. Roundness is an important property that was very useful in the recent proof of Rota's conjecture, which remained an unsolved problem for 40 years in matroid theory. In this thesis, we …