Definitions and basic examples. Duality and minors.
Connectivity of matroids and comparsion with graph connectivity. Matroid intersection theorem and its applications.
Representability, representable, binary and regular matroids. Graphic matroids.
Algorithmic aspects of matroids.
Introduction to matroid theory - definitions (independent sets, basis, cycles, rank function), operations on matroids (duality and minors), matroidal connectivity, classes of matroids and their representations.