Solving Rota's Conjecture

Solving Rota's Conjecture (PDF), was published in the August 2014 issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society. In the article, Jim Geelen, Bert Gerards and Geoff Whittle give a high-level overview of their 15-year effort to prove Rota's celebrated conjecture and also a matroid generalization of the Robertson-Seymour well-quasi-ordering theorem for minor-closed families of graphs.

Significant parts of the machinery needed for the proof of Rota's conjecture were developed with Tony Huynh, a former PhD student of Jim's, and Stefan Van Zwam, a former postdoctoral fellow of Jim's.

Jim, Bert and Geoff are now immersed in writing up the proofs, a daunting task that will take several years to complete.