On the number of matroids

DOI10.1007/S00493-014-3029-ZMaRDI QIDQ6233984arXivFDO

Authors N. Bansal, R. A. Pendavingh, J. G. van der Pol

Publication date 27 June 2012

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Vertex subsets with special properties (dominating sets, independent sets, cliques, etc.) (05C69) Asymptotic enumeration (05A16) Combinatorial aspects of matroids and geometric lattices (05B35)

Abstract: We consider the problem of determining $m_n$, the number of matroids on $n$ elements. The best known lower bound on $m_n$ is due to Knuth (1974) who showed that $loglog{m}_n$ is at least $n-3/2logn-1$. On the other hand, Piff (1973) showed that $loglog{m}_{n}leqn-logn+loglogn+O(1)$, and it has been conjectured since that the right answer is perhaps closer to Knuth's bound. We show that this is indeed the case, and prove an upper bound on $loglog{m}_n$ that is within an additive $1+o(1)$ term of Knuth's lower bound. Our proof is based on using some structural properties of non-bases in a matroid together with some properties of independent sets in the Johnson graph to give a compressed representation of matroids.

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