Charles Semple
University of Canterbury, N.Z.

What is a typical matroid?
  
Matroids (combinatorial geometries) are precisely the structures that
underlie the solution of many combinatorial optimisation problems. These
problems include scheduling and timetabling, and finding the minimum cost of
a communications network between cities. Moreover, matroid theory unifies
the notions of linear independence in linear algebra and forests in graph
theory as well as the notions of duality for graphs and codes.

In this talk, we investigate the following question: What is a typical
matroid? More particularly, if one selects an n-element labelled matroid
uniformly at random, what properties can one expect it to have when n is
sufficiently large?  Does it have high connectivity? What about its rank?
How many bases does it have? For labelled graphs, the analogous question has
been well-studied but, for labelled matroids, the question is largely
unexplored.