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The Free product of Matroids

Henry Crapo·William Schmitt
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Abstract

We introduce a noncommutative binary operation on matroids, called free product. We show that this operation respects matroid duality, and has the property that, given only the cardinalities, an ordered pair of matroids may be recovered, up to isomorphism, from its free product. We use these results to give a short proof of Welsh's 1969 conjecture, which provides a progressive lower bound for the number of isomorphism classes of matroids on an n-element set.

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Henry Crapo, William Schmitt. 2004-09-06. The Free product of Matroids. https://arxiv.org/abs/math/0409080

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