Supersolvable and modularly complemented matroid extensions (Q1178038)

A simple matroid is representable if and only if it occurs as a restriction of a projective space or, equivalently, if and only if it can be embedded into a connected matroid in which every flat is modular. It is well known that many simple matroids do not have such embeddings and the purpose of this paper is to seek embeddings of matroids into ambient spaces with somewhat less structure. A matroid \(M\) is modularly complemented if, for every flat \(X\), there is a modular flat \(Y\) such that \(X\cup Y\) spans \(M\) and \(X\cap Y\) has rank zero. The authors make partial progress on the conjecture that every rank-3 matroid can be embedded into a finite projective plane by showing that every such matroid can be embedded into a modularly complemented matroid. They also show that there are 8-element rank-4 matroids with no such embeddings. This leads to the consideration of a more general class than that of modularly complemented matroids, the class of supersolvable matroids, those matroids which contain a maximal chain of modular flats. By using the operation of Dilworth truncation, the authors prove that every matroid can be embedded into a supersolvable matroid of the same rank.