CHARACTERIZATIONS OF PARTITION LATTICES

One of the most well-known geometric lattices is a partition lattice. Every upper interval of a partition lattice is a partition lattice. The whitney numbers of a partition lattices are the Stirling numbers, and the characteristic polynomial is a falling factorial. The set of partitions with a single non-trivial block containing a fixed element is a Boolean sublattice of modular elements, so the partition lattice is supersolvable in the sense of Stanley [6]. In this paper, we rephrase four results due to Heller[1] and Murty [4] in terms of matroids and give several characterizations of partition lattices. Our notation and terminology follow those in [8,9]. To clarify our terminology, let G, be a finte geometric lattice. If S is the set of points (or rank-one flats) in G, the lattice structure of G induces the structure of a (combinatorial) geometry, also denoted by G, on S. The size vertical bar G vertical bar of the geometry G is the number of points in G. Let T be subset of S. The deletion of T from G is the geometry on the point set S/T obtained by restricting G to the subset S/T. The contraction G/T of G by T is the geometry induced by the geometric lattice [cl(T), over ^1] on the set S' of all flats in G covering cl(T). (Here, cl(T) is the closure of T, and over ^ 1 is the maximum of the lattice G.) Thus, by definition, the contraction of a geometry is always a geometry. A geometry which can be obtained from G by deletions and contractions is called a minor of G.