In the first talk, I will explain the language of matroids for those who haven’t seen it. This is a language which has been to develop to describe and extract the combinatorial structure of hyperplane arrangements.

In the remaining talks, I will present several of the main geometric constructions related to hyperplane arrangement complements and how they have been combinatorially described in terms of matroids. Particularly, I want to talk about the maximum likelihood degree, about the wonderful compactification and about the Chow quotient of the Grassmannian.

I hope that these topics should be interesting for people thinking about CSM classes, about June Huh’s recent work, about tropical linear spaces and about Hacking-Keel-Tevelev and Alexeev’s compactifications of the moduli space of hyperplane arrangements, and I will work to make them accessible to people who have not heard of matroids before.