Small vertex-transitive graphs of given degree and girth

We investigate the basic interplay between the small k-valent vertex-transitive graphs of girth g and the (k, g)-cages, the smallest k-valent graphs of girth g. We prove the existence of k-valent Cayley graphs of girth g for every pairof parameters k ≥ 2 and g ≥ 3, improve the lower bounds on the order of the smallest (k, g) vertex-transitive graphs forcertain families with prime power girth, and generalize the construction of Bray, Parker and Rowley that has yielded several of the smallest known (k, g)-graphs

Transitivity is not a (big) restriction on homotopy types

For every simplicial complex K there exists a vertex-transitive simplicial complex homotopy equivalent to a wedge of copies of K with some copies of the circle. It follows that every simplicial complex can occur as a homotopy wedge summand in some vertex-transitive complex. One can even demand that the vertex-transitive complex is the clique complex of a Cayley graph or that it is facet-transitive

On the defect of vertex-transitive graphs of given degree and diameter

We consider the problem of finding largest vertex-transitive graphs of given degree and diameter. Using two classical number theory results due to Niven and Erdős, we prove that for any fixed degree Δ ≥ 3 and any positive integer δ, the order of a largest vertex-transitive Δ-regular graph of diameter D differs from the Moore bound by more than δ for (asymptotically) almost all diameters D ≥ 2 . We also obtain an estimate for the growth of this difference, or defect, as a function of D

On perturbations of highly connected dyadic matroids

Geelen, Gerards, and Whittle [3] announced the following result: let $q = p^k$ be a prime power, and let $\mathcal{M}$ be a proper minor-closed class of $\mathrm{GF}(q)$-representable matroids, which does not contain $\mathrm{PG}(r-1,p)$ for sufficiently high $r$. There exist integers $k, t$ such that every vertically $k$-connected matroid in $\mathcal{M}$ is a rank-$(\leq t)$ perturbation of a frame matroid or the dual of a frame matroid over $\mathrm{GF}(q)$. They further announced a characterization of the perturbations through the introduction of subfield templates and frame templates. We show a family of dyadic matroids that form a counterexample to this result. We offer several weaker conjectures to replace the ones in [3], discuss consequences for some published papers, and discuss the impact of these new conjectures on the structure of frame templates.Comment: Version 3 has a new title and a few other minor corrections; 38 pages, including a 6-page Jupyter notebook that contains SageMath code and that is also available in the ancillary file

Templates for Representable Matroids

The matroid structure theory of Geelen, Gerards, and Whittle has led to a hypothesis that a highly connected member of a minor-closed class of matroids representable over a finite field is a mild modification (known as a perturbation) of a frame matroid, the dual of a frame matroid, or a matroid representable over a proper subfield. They introduced the notion of a template to describe these perturbations in more detail. In this dissertation, we determine these templates for various classes and use them to prove results about representability, extremal functions, and excluded minors. Chapter 1 gives a brief introduction to matroids and matroid structure theory. Chapters 2 and 3 analyze this hypothesis of Geelen, Gerards, and Whittle and propose some refined hypotheses. In Chapter 3, we define frame templates and discuss various notions of template equivalence. Chapter 4 gives some details on how templates relate to each other. We define a preorder on the set of frame templates over a finite field, and we determine the minimal nontrivial templates with respect to this preorder. We also study in significant depth a specific type of template that is pertinent to many applications. Chapters 5 and 6 apply the results of Chapters 3 and 4 to several subclasses of the binary matroids and the quaternary matroids---those matroids representable over the fields of two and four elements, respectively. Two of the classes we study in Chapter 5 are the even-cycle matroids and the even-cut matroids. Each of these classes has hundreds of excluded minors. We show that, for highly connected matroids, two or three excluded minors suffice. We also show that Seymour\u27s 1-Flowing Conjecture holds for sufficiently highly connected matroids. In Chapter 6, we completely characterize the highly connected members of the class of golden-mean matroids and several other closely related classes of quaternary matroids. This leads to a determination of the extremal functions for these classes, verifying a conjecture of Archer for matroids of sufficiently large rank