Some minimal non-orientable matroids of rank three (Q2277464)

A matroid M is orientable if one can partition every circuit and every cocircuit of M into positive and negative parts so that, whenever a circuit C meets a cocircuit \(C^*\), their intersection contains both an element that has the same sign in C and \(C^*\) and an element that has different signs in C and \(C^*\). The only rank-3 minimal non-orientable matroids previously known were the Fano matroid and the matroid \(M_ 8\) that is obtained from the ternary affine plane by deleting a single point. This paper constructs an infinite family of minor-minimal rank-3 matroids that are not orientable. The first member of this family is \(M_ 8\). The proof that the members of this family have the specified properties is based on \textit{Folkman} and \textit{Lawrence}'s ``topological representation theorem'' [J. Comb. Theory, Ser. B 25, 199-236 (1978)]. This theorem asserts that a rank-3 matroid M is orientable if and only if there is pseudoline arrangement in which the pseudolines correspond to the points of M and the vertices correspond to lines of M.