Finding the circuits of a matroid

Abstract

A matroid is a combinatorial structure that possesses important combinatorial properties of a wide variety of mathematical structures. Such varied structures as vector spaces, transversals, certain ployhedral corner points , cycles in a graph, spanning trees, and the source arcs used by a network flow are all special cases of matroids. Matroid theory provides a convenient way to summarize these scattered results and to extend them simultaneously [1, Ch. 21],1 [2-5], [8], [11].