"Signed-graphic matroids"

Dan Slilaty
Wright State University

Monday, December 1, 2008
4:00 pm, 845 Patterson Office Tower

Abstract:

Matroids are a combinatorial abstraction of linear dependence in vector spaces that are used to capture features from a variety of combinatorial objects that include configurations of points or hyperplanes in Euclidean space, graphs imbedded in surfaces or in space, error-correcting codes, and others. A signed graph is a pair S=(G,f) in which G is a graph and f is a labeling of the edges with elements of the group {+1,-1}. There are several matroids associated with signed graphs and they have been receiving much attention in the mathematical community as of late. We will discuss these matroids, their special properties, and where they fit into the rest of matroid theory.