5 research outputs found
Some inequalities for the Tutte polynomial
We prove that the Tutte polynomial of a coloopless paving matroid is convex
along the portions of the line segments x+y=p lying in the positive quadrant.
Every coloopless paving matroids is in the class of matroids which contain two
disjoint bases or whose ground set is the union of two bases of M*. For this
latter class we give a proof that T_M(a,a) <= max {T_M(2a,0), T_M(0,2a)} for a
>= 2. We conjecture that T_M(1,1) <= max {T_M(2,0), T_M(0,2)} for the same
class of matroids. We also prove this conjecture for some families of graphs
and matroids.Comment: 17 page
On the structure of the h-vector of a paving matroid.
We give two proofs that the h-vector of any paving matroid is a pure 0-sequence, thus answering in the affirmative a conjecture made by Stanley, for this particular class of matroids. We also investigate the problem of obtaining good lower bounds for the number of bases of a paving matroid given its rank and number of elements.The first author was supported by Conacyt of México Proyect8397