- Project Year:
2018
- REU Student (s):
Froylan Maldonado | San Diego City College CA
- Student 1 Institution:
San Diego City College
- Project Mentor:
Nicola Tarasca
- Project Mentor Area:
Mathematics
- Project Abstract:
The idea of matroids dates back to the 1930s where mathematician
Hassler Whitney introduces the abstraction of linear independence.
After the subject was introduced several other mathematicians started
contributing to the field; it soon expanded into different areas of interest like:
coding theory, topology, and graph theory. For what we're doing, the reader
doesn't require any background knowledge of matroids; only the basics of
abstract algebra and graph theory.
Matroids have a lot of interesting properties and
also have many different ways of being defined. They can be defined
from matrices, basis of different vector spaces, graphs,
projective planes, and etc. Even though many of these objects don't
seem to have a clear relantionship, they all are
considered matroids. This lead us to believe that studying some
more trivial cases of matroids might possibly
reveal some unknown nuances of more complicated matroids.
