While the graph minor theorem by Robertson and Seymour assures that any minor-closed class of graphs can be characterized by a finite list of excluded minors, such a succinct characterization by excluded minors is not always possible in matroids which are combinatorial abstraction from graphs. The class of matroids representable over a given infinite field is known to have an infinite number of excluded minors. In this paper, we show that, for any algebraic element x over the rational field ℚ the degree of whose minimal polynomial is 2, there exist infinitely many ℚ[x]-representable excluded minors of rank 3 for ℚ-representability. This implies that the knowledge that a given matroid is F-representable where F is a larger field than ℚ does not decrease the difficulty of excluded minors' characterization of ℚ-representability.

We investigate excluded minor characterizations of two fundamental classes of matroids: orientable matroids and representable matroids. We prove (i) for any fixed field F, there exist infinitely many excluded minors of rank 3 for the union of the class of orientable matroids and the class of F-representable matroids, and (ii) for any fixed field F with characteristic 0, there exist infinitely many orientable excluded minors of rank 3 for intersection of the class of orientable matroids and the class of F-representable matroids. We show these statements by explicitly constructing infinite families of excluded minors.

The behavior of Bard-type pivoting algorithms for the linear complementarity problem with a P-matrix is represented by an orientation of a hypercube. We call it a PLCP-cube. In 1978, Stickney and Watson conjectured that such an orientation has no facet on which all even outdegree vertices appear. We prove that this conjecture is true for acyclic PLCP-cubes in dimension five.

The first part of this paper contains an introduction to Bell inequalities and Tsirelson's theorem for the non-specialist. The next part gives an explicit optimum construction for the "hard" part of Tsirelson's theorem. In the final part we describe how upper bounds on the maximal quantum violation of Bell inequalities can be obtained by an extension of Tsirelson's theorem, and survey very recent results on how exact bounds may be obtained by solving an infinite series of semidefinite programs.

If a d-dimensional pure simplicial complex C has a shelling, which is a specific total order of all facets of C, C is said to be shellable. We consider the problem of deciding whether C is shellable or not. This problem is solved in linear time of m, the number of all facets of C, if d = 1 or C is a pseudomanifold in d = 2. Otherwise it is unknown at this point whether the decision of shellability can be solved in polynomial time of m. Thus, for the latter case, we had no choice but to apply a brute force method to the decision problem; namely checking up to the m! ways to see if one can arrange all the m facets of C into a shelling. In this paper, we introduce a new concept, called h-assignment, to C and propose a practical method using h-assignments to decide whether C is shellable or not. Our method can make the decision of shellability of C by smaller sized computation than the brute force method.