Homotopy properties of greedoids (Q1101115)

This paper is a survey of developments in the theory of greedoids that have been previously introduced by A. Björner, and by the authors of the present paper, as well. The following is a brief outline of the paper. Several basic definitions and facts about greedoids are recalled in Section 1. In Section 2 the concept of connectivity of greedoids is introduced and investigated. Section 3 contains several old and new results on the connection between greedoids and lattices. In Section 4, some basic facts from combinatorial homotopy theory are presented. Section 5 is devoted to shellability properties of greedoids, the concept of greedoid polynomial is introduced and studied in Section 6. In the last two sections, certain polyhedra associated with a greedoid are studied. More precisely, in Section 7 the main results about homotopy properties of bases and dominating sets are given, and similar homotopy results for the ordered version of greedoids are presented in Section 8.