Mathematics Commons^™

On Selected Subclasses Of Matroids, Tara Elizabeth Fife

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Matroids were introduced by Whitney to provide an abstract notion of independence.

In this work, after giving a brief survey of matroid theory, we describe structural results for various classes of matroids. A connected matroid $M$ is unbreakable if, for each of its flats $F$, the matroid $M/F$ is connected%or, equivalently, if $M^*$ has no two skew circuits. . Pfeil showed that a simple graphic matroid $M(G)$ is unbreakable exactly when $G$ is either a cycle or a complete graph. We extend this result to describe which graphs are the underlying graphs of unbreakable frame matroids. A laminar family is …