On Brylawski's generalized duality

Abstract

We introduce a notion of duality (due to Brylawski) that generalizes matroid duality to arbitrary rank functions. This generalized duality allows for generalized operations (deletion and contraction) and a generalized polynomial based on the matroid Tutte polynomial. This polynomial satisfies a deletion-contraction recursion. We explore this notion of duality for greedoids, antimatroids and demi-matroids, proving that matroids correspond precisely to objects that are simultaneously greedoids and "dual" greedoids.