Is the missing axiom of matroid theory lost forever?

DOI10.1093/QMATH/HAT031zbMATH Open1305.05040OpenAlexW2800857566WikidataQ114009664 ScholiaQ114009664MaRDI QIDQ2939482FDOQ2939482

Authors Dillon Mayhew, Geoff Whittle, Mike Newman 

Publication date 22 January 2015

Published in The Quarterly Journal of Mathematics (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1204.3365

zbMATH Keywords

monadic second-order logicmatroid representability

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Combinatorial aspects of matroids and geometric lattices (05B35) Models of other mathematical theories (03C65)

Abstract: We conjecture that it is not possible to finitely axiomatize matroid representability in monadic second-order logic for matroids, and we describe some partial progress towards this conjecture. We present a collection of sentences in monadic second-order logic and show that it is possible to finitely axiomatize matroids using only sentences in this collection. Moreover, we can also axiomatize representability over any fixed finite field (assuming Rota's conjecture holds). We prove that it is not possible to finitely axiomatize representability, or representability over any fixed infinite field, using sentences from the collection.

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Cited In (9)

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• The geometry of gaussoids
• Excluded minors for matroids satisfying Kinser's inequalities
• On the number of matroids
• Rota’s Conjecture, the Missing Axiom, and Prime Cycles in Toric Varieties
• Combinatorics and Hodge theory
• Matroid Theory for Algebraic Geometers
• Positively oriented matroids are realizable

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