Séminaire Lotharingien de Combinatoire, 93B.135 (2025), 12 pp.

Sebastian Degen and Lukas Kühne

Most q-Matroids are Not Representable

Abstract. A q-matroid is the analogue of a matroid which arises by replacing the finite ground set of a matroid with a finite-dimensional vector space over a finite field. These q-matroids are motivated by coding theory as the representable q-matroids are the ones that stem from rank-metric codes. In this note, we establish a q-analogue of Nelson's theorem in matroid theory by proving that asymptotically almost all q-matroids are not representable. This answers a question about representable q-matroids by Jurrius and Pellikaan strongly in the negative.


Received: November 15, 2024. Accepted: February 15, 2025. Final version: April 1, 2025.

The following versions are available: