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arXiv · 1705.03624

Tverberg-type theorems for matroids: A counterexample and a proof

Pavle V. M. Blagojević·Albert Haase·Günter M. Ziegler
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Abstract

Bárány, Kalai, and Meshulam recently obtained a topological Tverberg-type theorem for matroids, which guarantees multiple coincidences for continuous maps from a matroid complex to d-dimensional Euclidean space, if the matroid has sufficiently many disjoint bases. They make a conjecture on the connectivity of k-fold deleted joins of a matroid with many disjoint bases, which would yield a much tighter result - but we provide a counterexample already for the case of k=2, where a tight Tverberg-type theorem would be a topological Radon theorem for matroids. Nevertheless, we prove the topological Radon theorem for the counterexample family of matroids by an index calculation, despite the failure of the connectivity-based approach.

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Pavle V. M. Blagojević, Albert Haase, Günter M. Ziegler. 2017-05-10. Tverberg-type theorems for matroids: A counterexample and a proof. https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.03624

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