Lagrangian combinatorics of matroids (Q6042819)

In [J. Am. Math. Soc. 36, No. 3, 727--794 (2023; Zbl 1512.05068)], the authors of the present paper under review provided a construction of the conormal fan of a simple, co-simple matroid \(M\), and used this construction to introduce the Lagrangian geometry of \(M\); they also used the conormal fan to give a Lagrangian-geometric interpretation of the \(h\)-vector of the broken circuit complex of \(M\). In particular, the \(h\)-vector has as entries the degrees of the mixed intersections of certain convex piecewise-linear functions \(\gamma\) and \(\delta\) on the conormal fan of \(M\). By showing that the conormal fan satisfies the Hodge-Riemann relations, the authors proved Brylawski's conjecture that this \(h\)-vector is a log-concave sequence. The present paper under review is the sequel to the paper described above. It explores the Lagrangian combinatorics of matroids, further developing the combinatorics of biflats and biflags of a matroid, and relating them to the theory of basis activities developed by \textit{W. T. Tutte} [J. Comb. Theory 2, 301--320 (1967; Zbl 0147.42902)], \textit{H. H. Crapo} [Aequationes Math. 3, 211--229 (1969; Zbl 0197.50202)] and \textit{M. Las Vergnas} [Eur. J. Comb. 34, No. 8, 1390--1405 (2013; Zbl 1296.05045)]. The authors' main result, Theorem 1.1, is a combinatorial realization of the intersection-theoretic computation above. In particular, the \(k\)-th mixed intersection of \(\gamma\) and \(\delta\) is expressed explicitly as a sum of biflags corresponding to the \textsl{nbc} bases of internal activity \(k + 1\).