Straightening laws for Chow rings of matroids

Abstract

We give elementary and non-inductive proofs of three fundamental theorems about Chow rings of matroids: the standard monomial basis, Poincare duality, and the dragon-Hall-Rado formula. Our approach, which also works for augmented Chow rings of matroids, is based on a straightening law. This approach also gives a decomposition of the Chow ring of a matroid into pieces indexed by flats.