Sang-ilOum

For a vertex v of a graph G, the local complementation at v is an operation to obtain a new graph denoted by G*v from G such that two distinct vertices x, y are adjacent in G*v if and only if both x, y are neighbors of v and x, y are non-adjacent, or at least one …

Bouchet introduced isotropic systems in 1983 unifying some combinatorial features of binary matroids and 4-regular graphs. The concept of isotropic system is a useful tool to study vertex-minors of graphs and yet it is not well  known. I will give an introduction to isotropic systems.

Every minor-closed class of matroids of bounded branch-width can be characterized by a minimal list of excluded minors, but unlike graphs, this list could be infinite in general. However, for each fixed finite field $\mathbb F$, the list contains only finitely many $\mathbb F$-representable matroids, due to the well-quasi-ordering of $\mathbb F$-representable matroids of bounded …