Numerically regular hereditary classes of combinatorial geometries (Q1074588)

Let \({\mathcal H}\) be a hereditary class of geometries, that is, \({\mathcal H}\) is a collection of simple matroids that is closed under minors and direct sums. A member G of \({\mathcal H}\) is extremal if no proper extension of G of the same rank is in \({\mathcal H}\). This paper studies those hereditary classes \({\mathcal H}\) with the property that, for all n, all rank n extremal members of \({\mathcal H}\) have the same number of elements. Such hereditary classes are called numerically regular. For such a class, let h(n) denote the number of elements in an extremal geometry of rank n. The main result of this paper determines all numerically regular hereditary classes for which the set \(\{h(n)-h(n-1):\quad 1\leq n<\infty \}\) has no upper bound. In particular, it is proved that all such classes have a unique extremal geometry of each rank. The hereditary classes of such type are called varieties and all varieties were previously determined by the author and \textit{J. Kahn} [Trans. Am. Math. Soc. 271, 485-499 (1982; Zbl 0503.05010)]. The author concludes with a number of examples of numerically regular hereditary classes that are not varieties including the classes of series-parallel networks, planar graphic geometries and cographic geometries.