Kinser inequalities and related matroids

Abstract

Kinser developed a hierarchy of inequalities dealing with the dimensions of certain spaces constructed from a given quantity of subspaces. These inequalities can be applied to the rank function of a matroid, a geometric object concerned with dependencies of subsets of a ground set. A matroid which is representable by a matrix with entries from some finite field must satisfy each of the Kinser inequalities. We provide results on the matroids which satisfy each inequality and the structure of the hierarchy of such matroids.