On Cographic Matroids and Signed-Graphic Matroids

We prove that a connected cographic matroid of a graph G is the bias matroid of a signed graph Σ iff G imbeds in the projective plane. In the case that G is nonplanar, we also show that Σ must be the projective-planar dual signed graph of an actual imbedding of G in the projective plane. As a corollary we get that, if G1, . . . , G29 denote the 29 nonseparable forbidden minors for projective-planar graphs, then the cographic matroids of G1, . . . , G29 are among the forbidden minors for the class of bias matroids of signed graphs. We will obtain other structural results about bias matroids of signed graphs along the way.