IS THE MISSING AXIOM OF MATROID THEORY LOST FOREVER?

作者:Mayhew Dillon*; Whittle Geoff; Newman Mike
来源:The Quarterly Journal of Mathematics, 2014, 65(4): 1397-1415.
DOI:10.1093/qmath/hat031

摘要

We conjecture that it is not possible to finitely axiomatize matroid representability in monadic second-order logic (MSOL) for matroids, and we describe some partial progress towards this conjecture. We present a collection of sentences in MSOL and show that it is possible to finitely axiomatize matroids using only sentences in this collection. Moreover, we can also axiomatize representability over any fixed finite field (assuming Rota%26apos;s conjecture holds). We prove that it is not possible to finitely axiomatize representability, or representability over any fixed infinite field, using sentences from the collection.

  • 出版日期2014-12