Combinatorics-Minor-Closed Classes of Polymatroids

Speaker: Joe Bonin, GWU
Date and time: Tuesday, February 20, 1-2pm
Place: Rome 771
Title: Minor-Closed Classes of Polymatroids
Abstract:  A polymatroid is an integer-valued function on the subsets of a set that has all of the properties of a matroid rank function with the possible exception of the cardinality bound.  Some, but not all, polymatroids can be obtained by adding the rank functions of some matroids on the same set.  We explore ideas related to such decompositions of polymatroids; this includes an extension of graph coloring, as well as some excluded-minor results.