The holonomy Lie algebra of a matroid
Abstract
We will start from the beginning and define a matroid and its Orlik-Solomon algebra and holonomy Lie algebra, but first we give some background from topology and cohomology. A (central) hyperplane arrangement is a finite number of subspaces of codimension one in a finite dimensional vector space over R, C or even finite fields. The space X which is the complement of the union of the hyperplanes has interesting properties. If you consider Rn the cohomology is however rather trivial, there is just an H0, since X is a disjoint union of contractible sets. But it is not a trivial task to compute |H0|. The way to do it is to consider the intersection lattice of the hyperplanes and compute its M\"obius function. The result is that the number of components is the sum of the absolut values of the M\"obius function (Zaslavsky 1975).