Regular matroid
In mathematics, a regular matroid is a matroid that can be represented over all fields. Definition A matroid is defined to be a family of subsets of a finite set, satisfying certain axioms. The sets in the family are called "independent sets". One of the ways of constructing a matroid is to select a finite set of vectors in a vector space, and to define a subset of the vectors to be independent in the matroid when it is linearly independent in the vector space. Every family of sets constructed in this way is a matroid, but not every matroid can be constructed in this way, and the vector spaces over different fields lead to different sets of matroids that can be constructed from them. A matroid is regular when, for every field , can be represented by a system of vectors over . Properties If a matroid is regular, so is its dual matroid, and so is every one of its minors. Every direct sum of regular matroids remains regular. Every graphic matroid (and every co-graphic matroid) is regular. Conversely, every regular matroid may be constructed by combining graphic matroids, co-graphic matroids, and a certain ten-element matroid that is