The Catalan matroid

We show how the set of Dyck paths of length 2n naturally gives rise to a matroid, which we call the "Catalan matroid" C_n. We describe this matroid in detail; among several other results, we show that C_n is self-dual, it is representable over the rationals but not over finite fields F_q with q < n-1, and it has a nice Tutte polynomial. We then generalize our construction to obtain a family of matroids, which we call "shifted matroids". They arose independently and almost simultaneously in the work of Klivans, who showed that they are precisely the matroids whose independence complex is a shifted complex.Comment: 17 pages; submitted to the Journal of Combinatorial Theory - Series

The number of point-splitting circles

Let S be a set of 2n+1 points in the plane such that no three are collinear and no four are concyclic. A circle will be called point-splitting if it has 3 points of S on its circumference, n-1 points in its interior and n-1 in its exterior. We show the surprising property that S always has exactly n^2 point- splitting circles, and prove a more general result.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figure

Flag arrangements and triangulations of products of simplices

We investigate the line arrangement that results from intersecting d complete flags in C^n. We give a combinatorial description of the matroid T_{n,d} that keeps track of the linear dependence relations among these lines. We prove that the bases of the matroid T_{n,3} characterize the triangles with holes which can be tiled with unit rhombi. More generally, we provide evidence for a conjectural connection between the matroid T_{n,d}, the triangulations of the product of simplices Delta_{n-1} x \Delta_{d-1}, and the arrangements of d tropical hyperplanes in tropical (n-1)-space. Our work provides a simple and effective criterion to ensure the vanishing of many Schubert structure constants in the flag manifold, and a new perspective on Billey and Vakil's method for computing the non-vanishing ones.Comment: 39 pages, 12 figures, best viewed in colo