Matroid flat counts can have many peaks

Abstract

We disprove Rota's conjecture that the counts of flats in a matroid according to rank form a unimodal sequence. Furthermore, we show that this sequence can have arbitrarily many peaks. The construction starts by finding a generalized theta graph for which log-concavity fails severely. By taking direct sums, we break log-concavity in many places. We then use Whittle's $q$-lift construction to produce a matroid whose flat counts have many peaks.

9 pages, 1 figure; supersedes arXiv:2607.22515 and section 2 of arXiv:2607.02208