matroid

Etymology

From matrix + -oid. They were so named by Hassler Whitney in 1935 in an article titled “On the abstract properties of linear dependence”.

noun

  1. (combinatorics) A structure that captures the essence of a notion of "independence" that generalizes linear independence in vector spaces and acyclicality in graphs.
    A matroid can be defined in terms of bases. A matroid consists of a ground set as well as a set of bases which is a nonempty subset of the power set of the ground set.

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