Oriented rank three matroids and projective planes

Recently, Goodman et al. [9, 10] have proven two conjectures by Grunbaum right, showing that any arrangement of pseudolines in the plane can be embedded into a flat projective plane and that there exists a universal topological projective plane in which every arrangement of pseudolines is stretchable. By Folkman and Lawrence's theorem [6], this plane contains every finite (simple) oriented rank three matroid. In this paper, we will also consider embeddings of oriented rank three matroids into topological projective planes, but we will take a quite different viewpoint: we shall show that there exists a projective plane Pi that contains the combinatorial geometry of every finite, orientable rank three matroid M-n, such that any choice of orientations chi(n), of the M-n, n is an element of N, extends to an orientation chi of Pi. Furthermore, these orientations correspond to archimedean orderings of Pi, hence the reorientation classes of every finite rank three matroid can be studied by the set of archimedian orderings of Pi. Since, by a celebrated result of Priess-Crampe [26], any archimedian projective plane can be completed and thus embedded into a flat projective plane, our results yield another proof of Grunbaum's conjectures and a new proof of the rank three case of Folkman and Lawrence's theorem. (C) 2000 Academic Press.