Some open problems on excluding a uniform matroid (Q953908)

This paper examines what is known and what is conjectured about the behavior of minor closed classes of matroids that exclude a uniform minor. Trying to extend the Graph Minors Structure Theorem [\textit{N. Robertson} and \textit{P. D. Seymour}, ``Graph minors. XVI: Excluding a non-planar graph'', J. Comb. Theory, Ser. B 89, No. 1, 43--76 (2003; Zbl 1023.05040)] leads the author to believe that it might be extremely hard to find a qualitative structure theorem for the class of matroids with no \(U_{a,b}\) minor. Several conjectures such as the Well-Quasi-Ordering conjecture of Robertson and Seymour, the Minor-Testing Conjecture of Robertson and Seymour and Rota's conjecture from 1971 on the number of excluded minors for the class of \(F\)-representable matroids are described, and what goes wrong for the class of spikes. All problems and conjectures are ordered by topics and the author gives his opinion on whether or not he believes the conjectures to be true, or how difficult the problems might be. The following conjecture, mentioned under the topic \textit{representability over the reals} might be easy, but got little attention so far: For any matroid \(N\) representable over the reals, there is an excluded minor \(M\) for the class of matroids representable over the reals such that \(M\) contains an \(N\)-minor.