====== Laura Anderson (Binghamton) ====== ====== An Introduction to Phased Matroids and the Phased Matroid Grassmannian ====== ===== Abstract for the Combinatorics Seminar 2013 September 24 ===== Phased matroids are combinatorial objects that play the same role for the complex numbers that oriented matroids play for the real numbers. They were introduced in 2012 as a potential tool for various problems in geometry and topology. I'll discuss the state of the field, focusing on progress toward a combinatorial model for the Grassmannian G(r,**C**n). (I talked about the same material last spring, but the ideas have been clarified since then.) ----