Circuits Through Cocircuits In A Graph With Extensions To Matroids

We show that for any k-connected graph having cocircumference c*, there is a cycle which intersects every cocycle of size c*-k + 2 or greater. We use this to show that in a 2-connected graph, there is a family of at most c* cycles for which each edge of the graph belongs to at least two cycles in the family. This settles a question raised by Oxley. A certain result known for cycles and cocycles in graphs is extended to matroids. It is shown that for a k-connected regular matroid having circumference c ≥ 2k if C₁ and C₂ are disjoint circuits satisfying r(C₁)+r(C₂)=r(C₁∪C₂), then |C₁|+|C₂|≤2(c-k + 1).