Today we’ll be looking at infinite matroids again. We started this series by examining the question of how infinite matroids could be defined. With a suitable definition in hand, we took a quick tour through the zoo of known examples. Then we took a closer look at one very flexible way to build infinite matroids: by sticking together infinite trees of matroids.

In that construction we used 2-sums to stick the matroids together. Suppose that we have a finite collection of matroids arranged in a tree, so that their ground sets overlap (always in single edges) if and only if they are adjacent in the tree. Then because 2-sums are associative we have an unambiguously defined 2-sum of that collection. In the previous post in this series, we saw that this construction also works if we allow the tree to be infinite, but that we have to specify a little extra information the set $\Psi$ of ends of the tree which the circuits are allowed to use.

The same trick can be used for other kinds of associative sum of finite matroids. In this post we’ll see how it works for sums of representable matroids, and why that is useful for understanding the topological spaces associated to infinite graphs.

To see how the addition of representable matroids works, we need to look at them from a slightly unusual angle. Let’s say that we have a matroid $M$ on a ground set $E$, and suppose that we have vectors $\{v_e | e \in E\}$ in some vector space over a field $k$, giving us a representation of $M$ over $k$. Then we can capture all the essential information about this representation by forgetting the details of the vector space and focusing just on the linear relationships amongst the vectors. More formally, we say that an element $\lambda$ of the space $k^E$ is a linear dependence of the $v_e$ if $\sum_{e \in E} \lambda(e)v_e = 0$. Then the linear dependences form a subspace $V$ of $k^E$, and this subspace is enough to recover the matroid $M$; the circuits of $M$ are precisely the minimal nonempty supports of vectors in $V$. For those who prefer to think of representations in terms of matrices rather than families of vectors, the subspace we’re working with is just the orthogonal complement of the row space of the matrix.

So we can encode representations of matroids on $E$ over $k$ as subspaces of $k^E$. This way of seeing representations fits well with matroid duality, in that if $V \subseteq k^E$ represents a matroid $M$ on $E$ then the orthogonal complement $V^{\bot}$ represents the dual matroid $M^*$. If we define $M(V)$ to be the matroid whose circuits are the minimal nonempty supports of elements of $V$, then we can express this as $M(V^{\bot}) = (M(V))^*$.

The advantage of this perspective is that there is a natural way to glue together such subspaces, which we can use to build a self-dual gluing operation for represented matroids. Suppose that we have two sets $E_1$ and $E_2$ and subspaces $V_1$ and $V_2$ of $k^{E_1}$ and $k^{E_2}$, respectively. We now want to glue these together to give a subspace $V_1 \oplus V_2$ of $E_1 \triangle E_2$. As with the 2-sum, we throw away the `gluing edges’ in the overlap $E_1 \cap E_2$. The idea is to take pairs of vectors which match on the gluing edges, patch them together and throw away the part supported on the gluing edges. More precisely, we set $V_1 \oplus V_2 := \{v \mathord{\upharpoonright}_{E_1 \triangle E_2} | v \in k^{E_1 \cup E_2}, v \mathord{\upharpoonright}_{E_i} \in V_i\}$.

Like the 2-sum, this definition is self-dual in the sense that $(M(V_1 \oplus V_2))^* = M(V_1^{\bot} \oplus V_2^{\bot})$. It is also associative, in that if $V_1$, $V_2$ and $V_3$ are subspaces of $k^{E_1}$, $k^{E_2}$ and $k^{E_3}$ respectively and the sets $E_1$ and $E_3$ are disjoint then $(V_1 \oplus V_2) \oplus V_3 = V_1 \oplus (V_2 \oplus V_3)$. So if we have a finite collection of such representations on ground sets $E_t$ arranged in a finite tree, such that the ground sets only overlap if they are adjacent in the tree, then we have an unambiguous sum of all these subspaces.

Just as for 2-sums, we can also glue together infinite trees of represented matroids in this way, as long as we are careful to specify which ends of the tree the circuits are allowed to use. Formally, we do this as follows. Suppose that we have a tree $T$, a family of sets $E_t$ indexed by the nodes of $T$, such that $E_s \cap E_t$ is only nonempty if $s = t$ or $s$ and $t$ are adjacent in $T$, a family of subspaces $V_t \subseteq k^{E_t}$ and a Borel subset $\Psi$ of the set $\Omega(T)$ of ends of $T$. Then we can build a subspace of $k^{\bigtriangleup_{t}E_t}$ by setting

$\bigoplus^{\Psi}_t V_t := \{v \mathord{\upharpoonright}_{\bigtriangleup_t E_t} | v \in k^{\bigcup_t E_t}, v \mathord{\upharpoonright}_{E_t} \in V_t \text{ and } \Omega(T) \cap \overline{\{t | v \upharpoonright_{E_t} = 0\}} \subseteq \Psi\}$

and $M(\bigoplus^{\Psi}_t V_t)$ will be an infinite matroid.

What are these infinite sums good for? Well, if we have a representable matroid and we have a $k$-separation of that matroid then we can split it up as a sum of two matroids in this way such that there are fewer than $k$ gluing edges. We can use this to break problems about bigger matroids down into problems about smaller matroids. Similarly, if we have a nested collection of finite separations in an infinite matroid, cutting the ground set up into a tree of finite parts, then we can cut the matroid up into a sum of finite matroids and analyse its properties in terms of their properties. This kind of chopping up and reconstruction can also be helpful to show that the infinite object is a matroid in the first place.

Let’s see how that might work for a more concrete problem. Suppose that we have a locally finite graph $G$. Then we can build a topological space $|G|$ from it by formally adding its ends as new points at infinity (see for example [D10]). These spaces and their subspaces are key elements of topological infinite graph theory, which was where this series of posts started.

At first, it was hoped that these subspaces would have the nice property that if they are connected then they are path connected. But Agelos Georgakopoulos eventually found a counterexample to this claim [G07]. However, the set of ends used by the counterexample he constructed was topologically horrible, so we might still hope that if we have a connected subspace $X$ of $|G|$ such that the set $\Psi$ of ends contained in $X$ is topologically nice, then $X$ will be path-connected. Well, if we take `topologically nice’ to mean `Borel’, then the ideas above let us show that this is true.

We can do this by considering the matroid whose circuits are the edge sets of those topological circles in $|G|$ which only go through ends in $\Psi$. More precisely, we need to show that this really does give the circuit set of a matroid $M(G, \Psi)$. If we can do that, then we can argue as follows:

Let $P$ be the set of edges which, together with both endpoints, are completely included in $X$. Let $u$ and $v$ be vertices in $X$. Build a new graph $G + e$ with an extra edge $e$ joining $u$ to $v$. Then since $X$ is connected, there can be no cocircuit of $M(G + e, \Psi)$ which contains $e$ and is disjoint from $P$ (such a cocircuit would induce a topological separation of $X$ with $u$ and $v$ on opposite sides). So $e$ is not a coloop in the restriction of $M(G + e, \Psi)$ to $P \cup \{e\}$. Hence there is a circuit through $e$ in that matroid, and removing $e$ from the corresponding topological circle gives an arc from $u$ to $v$ through $X$ in $|G|$. So any two vertices are in the same path-component of $X$. Similar tricks show the same for ends and interior points of edges.

What this argument shows is that the connection between connectivity and path-connectivity is encoded in the statement that $M(G, \Psi)$ is a matroid. To prove that statement, we can build $M(G, \Psi)$ as the sum of an infinite tree of graphic matroids in the sense described above. First of all, since $G$ is locally finite, we can cut it up into an infinite tree of finite connected parts using disjoint finite separators. Then we define the torso corresponding to a part to consist of that part together with new edges forming complete graphs on each of the separators. This gives us an infinite tree of finite graphs, and the ends of the tree correspond precisely to the ends of $G$. Now we take the graphic matroids corresponding to those graphs, take the standard binary representations of those matroids, and glue them together along this tree, taking the ends in $\Psi$ to be allowed for circuits. And presto! We have build the matroid $M(G, \Psi)$.

The details of this argument are explained in [BC15].

I can’t resist mentioning that the matroids we’ve just built in a bottom-up way also have a top-down characterisation. Consider the class of matroids whose ground set is the set of edges of $G$, and in which every circuit is a topological circuit of $G$ and every cocircuit is a bond of $G$. Let’s call such matroids $G$-matroids.

For some graphs $G$, we can find $G$-matroids which are not of the form $M(G, \Psi)$. For example, in the following graph $Q$ we can define an equivalence relation on the (edge sets of) double rays by saying that two double rays are equivalent if they have finite symmetric difference. Then the set of finite circuits together with any collection of double rays closed under this equivalence relation gives the set of circuits of an infinite matroid.

The matroids I just described are a bit pathological, and they hover on the boundary between being binary and non-binary. None of them has a $U_{2,4}$-minor. They also still have the familiar property that any symmetric difference of two circuits is a disjoint union of circuits. But symmetric differences of three circuits might not be disjoint unions of circuits!

For example, there is such a matroid in which the first three sets depicted below are circuits, but the fourth, their symmetric difference, is not.

The problem is that these matroids are wild. This means that there are circuits and cocircuits which intersect in infinitely many elements. We only have a good theory of representability for tame matroids, those in which every intersection of a circuit with a cocircuit is finite. I hope to discuss this in more detail in a future post.

If we only consider tame $G$-matroids, then this proliferation of pathological matroids disappears. For the graph $Q$, for example, there are only 2 tame $Q$-matroids, namely the finite cycle matroid and the topological cycle matroid. Remarkably, for any locally finite graph $G$ it turns out that the tame $G$-matroids are precisely the matroids of the form $M(G, \Psi)$. So our top-down and bottom up characterisations meet, and any matroid associated to a graph can be built up from finite parts in a way which mirrors the structure of that graph. The reasons for this correspondence go far beyond the scope of this post, but they can for example be found in [BC16].

Now that we’ve seen the standard ways to build infinite matroids and their relationship to infinite graphs, in the next post we’ll examine the most important open problem about them: the Infinite Matroid Intersection Conjecture.

[BC15] N. Bowler and J. Carmesin, Infinite Matroids and Determinacy of Games, preprint here.
[BC16] N. Bowler and J. Carmesin, The ubiquity of Psi-matroids, preprint here.
[D10] R. Diestel, Locally finite graphs with ends: a topological approach I–III, Discrete Math 311–312 (2010–11).
[G07] A. Georgakopoulos. Connected but not path-connected subspaces of infinite graphs, Combinatorica, 27(6) 683–698 (2007).