A characterization of orthogonal duality in matroid theory (Q787994)

This paper is concerned with the fundamental link between duality, deletion and contraction in matroids. The author defines an operation on matroids to be a function from the collection of all matroids on finite sets into itself which preserves isomorphism of matroids and which maps a matroid on a set S to a matroid on the same set S. Two trivial examples of operations on matroids are the functions \(f_ 1\) and \(f_ 2\) where \(f_ 1\) maps a matroid M on a set S to the free matroid on S and \(f_ 2\) maps M to the rank-zero matroid on S. Both these operations interchange deletion and contraction, that is, if f is \(f_ 1\) or \(f_ 2\) and e is an element of a matroid M, then \(f(M\backslash e)=f(M)/e\) and \(f(M/e)=f(M)\backslash e\). This paper shows that the only other operation on matroids with this property, and hence the only non-trivial such operation on matroids, is duality.