Building matrices with prescribed size and number of invertible submatrices

Abstract

Given an ordered triple of positive integers $(n,r,b)$, where $1\leq b\leq\binom{n}{r}$, does there exist a matrix of size $r\times n$ with exactly $b$ invertible submatrices of size $r\times r$? Such a matrix is called an $(n,r,b)$-matrix. This question is a stronger version of an open problem in matroid theory raised by Dominic Welsh. In this paper, we prove that an $(n,r,b)$-matrix exists when the corank satisfies $n-r\leq3$, unless $(n,r,b)=(6,3,11)$. Furthermore, we show that an $(n,r,b)$-matrix exists when the rank $r$ is large relative to the corank $n-r$.