# The infinite matroid intersection conjecture

Today we’ll return to our examination of infinite matroids. So far we saw why they are defined the way they are and what the known examples look like. Then we examined a very flexible way of building infinite matroids from trees of finite matroids and saw how to use that construction as a tool in topological infinite graph theory.

The aim today is to understand the deepest and most important unproved conjecture about infinite matroids, the infinite matroid intersection conjecture. We won’t be looking at progress towards the conjecture today, just approaching the statement from a number of angles and getting a sense of its connections to various very different-looking problems in infinite combinatorics. I hope that by the end of the post you will be convinced, as I am, that it is a deep and compelling problem. Here it is:

Conjecture (Nash-Williams): Let $M$ and $N$ be (possibly infinite) matroids on the same ground set $E$. Then there are a subset $I$ of $E$ and a partition of $E$ into sets $P$ and $Q$ such that $I$ is independent in both $M$ and $N$, $I \cap P$ spans $P$ in $M$ and $I \cap Q$ spans $Q$ in $N$.

Like a TARDIS, at a first glance this statement seems simple and perhaps a little odd, and its deeper significance is hidden. To get a sense of that significance, we must go on a long journey and see how it materialises within apparently widely separated worlds.

Our journey begins with the observation that finding good infinite versions of theorems about finite combinatorial objects is hard. All too often, the obvious generalisation is either straightforwardly false or else is a simple consequence of the finite version of the theorem, and as such has no new content.

An example of the latter phenomenon is Menger’s Theorem. If $G$ is a graph and $A$ and $B$ are sets then an $A$-$B$ separator in $G$ is defined to be a set $S$ of vertices of $G$ such that there is no path from $A$ to $B$ in $G – S$. Menger’s theorem states that if $G$ is finite then the minimal size of an $A$-$B$ separator in $G$ is the same as the maximal size of a set of disjoint paths from $A$ to $B$ in $G$.

The obvious way to generalise this statement to infinite graphs would be to simply replace the word ‘size’ with the word ‘cardinality’ in both places where it appears. However, the statement obtained in this way has no more content than the finite version of the theorem. We can see this by considering an $A$-$B$ separator $S$ of minimal cardinality.

If $S$ is infinite, then any set of fewer than $|S|$ paths from $A$ to $B$ uses fewer than $|S|$ vertices, and so cannot be maximal. So in that case the statement is clear, and we can suppose instead that $|S|$ is some natural number $n$. Now for each $m \leq n$ we can easily build a finite subgraph $G_m$ of $G$ in which any $A$-$B$ separator has size at least $m$: we may take $G_0$ to be empty, and build $G_{m+1}$ from $G_m$ by adding a path $P_X$ of $G$ from $A$ to $B$ avoiding each set $X$ of $m$ vertices of $G_m$. Then by Menger’s theorem $G_n$ already contains $n$ disjoint paths from $A$ to $B$.

It was Paul Erdős who saw how to get a much deeper infinite generalisation by first reformulating Menger’s theorem as a structural statement. Suppose that we consider an $A$-$B$ separator $S$ of minimal size and a set $\cal P$ of disjoint paths from $A$ to $B$ of maximal size. Then each path in $\cal P$ contains at least one vertex in $S$, and these vertices must all be distinct since the paths are disjoint. But by Menger’s theorem there can only be as may paths in $\cal P$ as there are vertices in $S$. So $S$ must consist of one vertex on each path in $\cal P$.

So it follows from Menger’s theorem that in a finite graph $G$ we can always find a set $\cal P$ of disjoint $A$-$B$ paths together with an $A$-$B$ separator $S$ consisting of one vertex from each path in $\cal P$. On the other hand, this structural statement also implies Menger’s theorem. After all, if ${\cal P}’$ is a set of disjoint paths from $A$ to $B$ of maximal size and $S’$ is an $A$-$B$ separator of minimal size then $|S’| \leq |S| = |{\cal P}| \leq |{\cal P}’|$. But also $|{\cal P}’| \leq |S’|$ since each path in ${\cal P}’$ must contain a different point of $S’$. So $|{\cal P}’| = |S’|$, as desired.

Erdős’ generalisation of Menger’s theorem is therefore the following structural statement:

Theorem (Aharoni and Berger): Let $G$ be a (possibly infinite) graph and let $A$ and $B$ be sets. Then there is a set ${\cal P}$ of disjoint $A$-$B$ paths together with an $A$-$B$ separator $S$ consisting of one vertex from each path in ${\cal P}$.

This statement contains some serious content about the structure of infinite graphs, and it remained open for almost half a century before finally being proved by Aharoni and Berger in 2009 [AB09]. Their proof remains one of the deepest ever given in infinite combinatorics.

Another example of the difficulties of generalisation from finite to infinite objects is given by the tree packing and covering theorems. The tree covering theorem states that a connected graph $G$ is a union of $k$ spanning trees if and only if for any set $X$ of vertices of $G$ the induced subgraph $G[X]$ has at most $k(|X| – 1)$ edges, and the tree packing theorem states that a connected graph $G$ includes $k$ edge-disjoint spanning trees if and only if for any partition $P$ of the vertex set of $G$, the quotient graph $G/P$ has at least $k(|P|-1)$ edges. Here $G/P$ is the graph whose vertices are the partition classes and whose edges are those of $G$ which go between partition classes, with endpoints the partition classes which they join.

Once more, the obvious generalisation of the tree covering theorem to infinite graphs has no more content than the finite version of the theorem; it can be proved from it by a straightforward compactness argument. On the other hand the obvious generalisation of the tree packing theorem to infinite graphs is false; there is a counterexample due to Aharoni and Thomassen [AT89]. And once more, to find the correct infinite version of the theorems we must begin by finding a structural version in the finite case. Indeed, it turns out that the tree packing and covering theorems have a unifying structural generalisation:

Theorem ([D17, Theorem 2.4.4]): Let $G$ be a connected finite graph and $k$ a natural number. Then there is a partition $P$ of the vertex set of $G$ such that $G/P$ is a union of $k$ spanning trees and $G[X]$ is connected and has $k$ edge-disjoint spanning trees for each partition class $X$ of $P$.

This tree packing/covering theorem implies both the tree packing theorem and the tree covering theorem. For tree packing, the necessity of the condition is clear, so it suffices to prove sufficiency. We can do this by applying the condition to the partition $P$ given by the tree packing/covering theorem. This gives that $G/P$ has at least $k(|P|-1)$ edges. Since it is a union of $k$ spanning trees, those trees must be edge disjoint. Combining these with the edge-disjoint spanning trees in each $G[X]$ gives $k$ edge-disjoint spanning trees in $G$. The derivation of the tree covering theorem from the packing/covering theorem is similar.

This gives us a nontrivial common generalisation of the tree packing and covering theorems to infinite graphs: we can simply omit the word ‘finite’ from the tree packing/covering theorem. The proof of this generalisation, though much simpler than that for the infinite version of Menger’s theorem, goes beyond the scope of this post.

We have now seen two examples where, to find the correct infinite generalisation of a theorem about finite graphs, it was necessary to first reformulate the finite theorem as a structural result. The same is true for theorems about finite matroids, but in this case something remarkable happens. The infinite structural statement you get is usually just the infinite matroid intersection conjecture!

This is not too surprising for the matroid intersection theorem, since Nash-Williams formulated the intersection conjecture to be an infinite structural generalisation of that statement. Recall that the matroid intersection theorem states that the largest size of a common independent set of two matroids $M$ and $N$ on the same ground set $E$ is the same as the minimum value over all partitions of $E$ into sets $P$ and $Q$ of $r_M(P) + r_N(Q)$. The inequality one way around is clear, since if $I$ is independent in both $M$ and $N$ and $\{P, Q\}$ is a partition of $E$ then $|I| = |I \cap P| + |I \cap Q| \leq r_M(P) + r_N(Q)$. For this inequality to be an equality, we must have that $I \cap P$ spans $P$ in $M$ and $I \cap Q$ spans $Q$ in $N$, just as in the conjecture.

There are some less expected cases. Let’s consider Tutte’s linking theorem, the closest matroidal analogue of Menger’s theorem. Let $M$ be a finite matroid with ground set $E$, and let $A$ and $B$ be disjoint subsets of $E$. Let $E’ := E \setminus (A \cup B)$. Then the connectivity $\lambda_M(A, B)$ from $A$ to $B$ in $M$ is defined to be the minimal value of $\kappa_M(A \cup P)$ over all bipartitions of $E’$ into sets $P$ and $Q$. Here $\kappa_M$ is the connectivity function of $M$, given by $\kappa_M(X) := r_M(X) + r_M(E \setminus X) – r(M)$. The linking theorem states that the maximum value of $\kappa_N(A)$ over all minors $N$ of $M$ with ground set $A \cup B$ is $\lambda_M(A,B)$.

It turns out that there is a structural analogue of this statement. Each such minor $N$ must have the form $M/I\backslash J$, where $I$ and $J$ form a partition of $E’$. By moving loops of $M/I$ into $J$ if necessary, we may suppose that $I$ is independent. We may now calculate as follows:

$\kappa_{M/I \setminus J}(A) = (r(A \cup I) – |I|) + (r(B \cup I) – |I|) – (r(M) – |I|) \\= (r(A \cup I) – |Q \cap I|) + (r(B \cup I) – |P \cap I|) – r(M) \\ \leq r(A \cup (I \cap P)) + r(B \cup (I \cap Q)) – r(M) \\ \leq r(A \cup P) + r(B \cup Q) – r(M) \\ = \kappa_M(A \cup P)$

So equality of the left and right sides is equivalent to the statement that each inequality in the above calculation is an equality, giving the following four conditions:

1. $I \cap P$ spans $P$ in $M/A$
2. $I \cap Q$ spans $Q$ in $M/B$
3. $I \cap P$ is independent in $M/(B \cup (I \cap Q))$
4. $I \cap Q$ is independent in $M/(A \cup (I \cap P))$

The outlines of our TARDIS are beginning to materialise. Indeed, consider a minimal set $I$ satisfying these conditions. By minimality, $I \cap P$ will be independent in $M/A$ and $I \cap Q$ will be independent in $M/B$. Thus $I$ itself will be independent in both matroids. To put it another way, $I$, $P$ and $Q$ will witness that $M/A \backslash B$ and $M \backslash A/B$ satisfy the matroid intersection conjecture.

Thus the infinite generalisation of Tutte’s linking theorem is the statement that, for any (possibly infinite) matroid $M$ and any disjoint sets $A$ and $B$ of elements of $M$, the matroids $M/A\backslash B$ and $M \backslash A/B$ satisfy the infinite matroid intersection conjecture. Given this connection, it should not be too surprising that Aharoni and Berger’s infinite generalisation of Menger’s theorem follows from the infinite matroid intersection conjecture. Precise details of the derivation can be found in [ACF18].

What about the tree packing and covering theorems? Their matroidal analogues are the base packing and covering theorems, which in their full generality apply to a list $M_1, M_2, \ldots M_k$ of finite matroids on a common ground set $E$. A base packing for such a list is a collection of disjoint bases, one from each $M_i$. A base covering for such a list is a collection of bases, one from each $M_i$, whose union is the whole of $E$. The base packing theorem states that there is a base packing precisely when for any subset $Q$ of $E$ we have $\sum_{i = 1}^k r(M_i.Q) \leq |Q|$, and the base covering theorem states that there is a base covering precisely when for any subset $P$ of $E$ we have $\sum_{i = 1}^k r(M_i | P) \geq |P|$.

Once more we can combine these statements into a unified structural statement, the base packing/covering theorem, which states that given such a list of finite matroids on $E$ we can find a bipartition of $E$ into sets $P$ and $Q$ such that the matroids $M_1 | P, \ldots M_k | P$ have a packing and the matroids $M_1.Q, \ldots M_k.Q$ have a covering. The derivations of the base packing and covering theorems from this statement are analogous to the derivation of the tree packing theorem from the tree packing/covering theorem above. So the infinite version of the base packing and covering theorems is given by the same statement applied to a family of infinite matroids. We shall call this the base packing/covering conjecture.

Let’s consider the special case $k = 2$ in more detail. The existence of a packing for $M_1 | P$ and $M_2 | P$ is equivalent to the existence of a subset $I_P$ of $P$ such that $I_P$ spans $P$ in $M_1$ and $P \setminus I_P$ spans $P$ in $M_2$. Similarly the existence of a covering for $M_1.Q$ and $M_2.Q$ is equivalent to the existence of a subset $I_Q$ of $Q$ such that $I_Q$ is independent in $M_1/P$ and $Q \setminus I_Q$ is independent in $M_2/P$. Since a set is independent in a matroid precisely when its complement is spanning in the dual matroid, we can rephrase these conditions as follows:

1. $I_P$ spans $P$ in $M_1$
2. $I_Q$ spans $Q$ in $M_2^*$
3. $I_P$ is independent in $M_2^*/Q$
4. $I_Q$ is independent in $M_1/P$

Once again, as if from nowhere, the TARDIS appears. If we choose $I_P$ and $I_Q$ minimal subject to conditions (i) and (ii) then they will still satisfy conditions (iii) and (iv), which will guarantee that $I:=I_P \cup I_Q$ is independent in both $M_1$ and $M_2^*$, meaning that $I$, $P$ and $Q$ witness that $M_1$ and $M_2^*$ satisfy the infinite matroid intersection conjecture.

The TARDIS not only appears in unexpected places, it is also bigger on the inside than it seems. For example, the remarks in the last couple of paragraphs only apply to pairs of matroids, that is, to lists of length 2. But in fact it is possible to derive the full base packing/covering conjecture from the special case of pairs, and hence from the infinite matroid intersection conjecture. We will see the reasons for this when we look at the structure of the conjecture more closely in the next post in the series. For now we just note the consequence that the tree packing/covering theorem mentioned earlier also follows from the infinite matroid intersection conjecture.

We have seen how the infinite matroid intersection conjecture arises naturally as the infinite structural analogue of the matroid intersection theorem, the linking theorem, and the base packing and covering theorems. The same also holds for the matroid union theorem, which we do not have space to discuss here [BC15]. Thus the process of finding an infinite generalisation of all these statements reveals their unified structural heart. In the next post we will examine that structural heart more closely, looking at just what sort of structure the conjecture gives us, and we will survey the special cases for which the conjecture is already known.

Bibliography:

[AB09] R. Aharoni and E. Berger, Menger’s Theorem for Infinite Graphs, Inventiones mathematicae 176(1):1–62 (2009).

[ACF18] E. Aigner-Horev, J. Carmesin and J.-O. Fröhlich, On the Intersection of Infinite Matroids, Discrete Mathematics 341(6):1582-1596 (2018).

[AT89] R. Aharoni and C. Thomassen, Infinite, highly connected digraphs with no two arc-disjoint spanning trees. J. Graph Theory, 13:71–74 (1989).

[BC15] N. Bowler and J. Carmesin, Matroid Intersection, Base Packing and Base Covering for Infinite Matroids, Combinatorica 35(2):153-180 (2015).

[D17] R. Diestel, Graph Theory, 5th edition, Springer-Verlag (2017).

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