On Rota's conjecture and excluded minors containing large projective geometries. (Q2490840)

Rota's conjecture states for any prime power \(q\), there are only finitely many pairwise nonisomorphic excluded minors for the class of GF\((q)\)-representable matroids. In the paper under review, the authors prove excluded minors cannot contain large projective geometries: Theorem. For each prime power \(q\), there exists an integer \(k\) such that no excluded minor for the class of GF\((q)\)-representable matroids contains a PG\((k, q)\)-minor. The PG\((k,q)\) is the rank \((k+1)\) projective geometry over GF\((q)\). This complements previous results of \textit{J. F. Geelen, B. Gerards} and \textit{G. Whittle} [Research Report 03-4, School of Mathematical and Computing Sciences, Victoria University of Wellington (2003)] that for any integer \(k\) there are only finitely many excluded minors that do not contain the matroid of a \(k \times k\) grid.