Preface

Summary

This is the third volume of a series that began with Theory of Matroids and continued with Combinatorial Geometries. These three volumes are the culmination of more than a decade of effort on the part of the many contributors, potential contributors, referees, the publisher, and numerous other interested parties, to all of whom I am deeply grateful. To all those who waited, please accept my apologies. I trust that this volume will be found to have been worth the wait.

This volume begins with Walter Whiteley's chapter on the applications of matroid theory to the rigidity of frameworks: matroid constructions prove to be rather useful and matroid terminology provides a helpful language for the basic results of this theory. Next we have Deza's chapter on the beautiful applications of matroid theory to a special aspect of combinatorial designs, namely perfect matroid designs. In Chapter 3, Oxley considers ways of generalizing the matroid axioms to infinite ground sets, and Simões-Pereira's chapter on matroidal families of graphs discusses other ways of defining a matroid on the edge set of a graph than the usual graphic matroid method. Next, Rival and Stanford consider two questions on partition lattices. These lattices are a special case of geometric lattices and the inclusion of this chapter will provide a lattice-theoretic perspective which has been lacking in much current matroid research (but which seems alive and well in oriented matroids). Then we have the comprehensive survey by Brylawski and Oxley of the Tutte polynomial and Tutte-Grothendieck invariants. These express the deletion- contraction decomposition that is so important within matroid theory and some of its important applications, namely graph theory and coding theory.