A natural family of flag matroids

Abstract

A flag matroid can be viewed as a chain of matroids linked by quotients. Flag matroids, of which relatively few interesting families have previously been known, are a particular class of Coxeter matroids. In this paper we give a family of flag matroids arising from an enumeration problem that is a generalization of the tennis ball problem. These flag matroids can also be defined in terms of lattice paths and they provide a generalization of the lattice path matroids of [Bonin et al., JCTA 104 (2003)].