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New Zealand Mathematics Colloquium 2001
December 3-6, 2001
Massey University
Palmerston North, New Zealand

Organizers
Dr I. Boglaev, Dr M. Carter, Dr J. Hudson, Dr C. Little (convenor), Ass. Prof R. McLachlan, Ass. Prof C. Lai

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Branch Width and Rota's Conjecture
by
Geoff Whittle
Victoria University
Coauthors: James Geelen

In 1976 Rota conjectured that for any given finite field F, the matroids representable over F can be characterised by a finite set of forbidden minors. So far Rota's conjecture is known to be true only for the fields GF(2), GF(3) and GF(4). A matroid has branch width k if it decomposes across a sufficiently large set of non-crossing k-separations. Branch width is an analogue of the well-studied notion of tree width. In the talk I will discuss a recent result in which it is shown that the F-representable matroids of bounded branch width have a finite number of excluded minors.

Date received: October 3, 2001

Copyright © 2001 by the author(s). The author(s) of this document and the organizers of the conference have granted their consent to include this abstract in Atlas Conferences Inc. Document # cahf-13.