On Rota's conjecture and excluded minors containing large projective geometries. (Q2490840): Difference between revisions

Rota's conjecture states for any prime power \(q\), there are only finitely many pairwise nonisomorphic excluded minors for the class of GF\((q)\)-representable matroids. In the paper under review, the authors prove excluded minors cannot contain large projective geometries: Theorem. For each prime power \(q\), there exists an integer \(k\) such that no excluded minor for the class of GF\((q)\)-representable matroids contains a PG\((k, q)\)-minor. The PG\((k,q)\) is the rank \((k+1)\) projective geometry over GF\((q)\). This complements previous results of \textit{J. F. Geelen, B. Gerards} and \textit{G. Whittle} [Research Report 03-4, School of Mathematical and Computing Sciences, Victoria University of Wellington (2003)] that for any integer \(k\) there are only finitely many excluded minors that do not contain the matroid of a \(k \times k\) grid.