Mayhew–Newman–Welsh–Whittle conjecture on sparse paving matroid minors

A matroid is sparse paving if its nonspanning circuits are hyperplanes; equivalently, no nonbasis of size equal to the rank can be transformed into another nonbasis by exchanging one element for another. Let NN be a sparse paving matroid, and let EE be a ground set. Mayhew–Newman–Welsh–Whittle conjecture. Almost every matroid has an NN-minor; that is, the fraction of matroids on ground set EE that do not have an NN-minor tends to 00 as E|E|\to\infty. This conjecture asserts that every fixed sparse paving matroid occurs as a minor in almost every matroid, strengthening the broader belief that almost every matroid is sparse paving. Its resolution is not indicated in the source.

Sources & referencesView supporting material

Primary source

Jorn van der Pol, “Almost every matroid has an M(K_4)- or a W^3-minor”, arXiv:2111.11577 (2021).

Additional references

4 papers in this index state this conjecture (2013–2021). The statement above is taken from the most recent of them; the others are arXiv:1512.06655, arXiv:1308.2698, arXiv:1302.1315.

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