Ottawa–Carleton
Discrete Mathematics Group

26 September 2008, 11.30am
HP4351, Carleton

What does a random matroid look like? What are some of its properties? What does a "random matroid" mean?

A randomly chosen combinatorialist might describe a matroid as a generalization of a graph. This would be misleading: it's not hard to see that a randomly chosen matroid is almost certainly not a graph. Beyond that, not much seems to have been proved. We'll prove that a randomly chosen matroid has at least a 50% chance of being connected, and give a bunch of problems and conjectures.

We will not assume that a randomly chosen seminar participant has much background in matroids.

(joint work with Dillon Mayhew and Geoff Whittle)