Ternary paving matroids (Q1179280)

This paper specifies all ternary paving matroids. A paving matroid is a matroid in which no circuit has size less than the rank of the matroid. The main result of this work is the Theorem 1.1. This contains the most difficult part of the characterization of ternary paving matroids. Theorem 1.1: The 3-connected ternary paving matroids are precisely the 3- connected minors of \(\text{PG}(2,3)\), S(5,6,12), \(R_ 8\) and \(T_ 8\), where \(R_ 8\) is the real affine cube and \(T_ 8\) is an other 8-element self-dual matroid. In Section 2, all paving matroids that are not 3-connected are determined and this information is used to specify all such ternary matroids. In Section 3, the author proves Theorem 1.1, in particular, constructs all 3-connected ternary paving matroids by building up, an element at a time, from a wheel or a whirl through a sequence of 3-connected ternary paving matroids.