Cyclotomic and simplicial matroids

We show that two naturally occurring matroids representable over ℚ are equal: thecyclotomic matroid μ_n represented by then ^th roots of unity 1, ζ, ζ², …, ζ^n-1 inside the cyclotomic extension ℚ(ζ), and a direct sum of copies of a certain simplicial matroid, considered originally by Bolker in the context of transportation polytopes. A result of Adin leads to an upper bound for the number of ℚ-bases for ℚ(ζ) among then ^th roots of unity, which is tight if and only ifn has at most two odd prime factors. In addition, we study the Tutte polynomial of μ_n in the case thatn has two prime factors. First author supported by NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship. Second author supported by NSF grant DMS-0245379.