Mariel Supina (University of California, Berkeley)

Matroids are combinatorial objects that generalize the notion of independence, and their subdivisions have rich connections to geometry. Thus we are often interested in functions on matroids that behave nicely with respect to subdivisions, which are called valuations. Matroids are naturally linked to the symmetric group; generalizing to other finite reflection groups gives rise to Coxeter matroids. I will give an overview of these ideas and then present some recent work with Chris Eur and Mario Sanchez on constructing the universal valuative invariant of Coxeter matroids. Since matroids and their Coxeter analogues can be understood as families of polytopes with special combinatorial properties, I will present these results from a polytopal perspective.