A Theory of Congruences and Birkhoff’s Theorem for Matroids

A congruence is defined for a matroid. This leads to suitable versions of the algebraic isomorphism theorems for matroids. As an application of the congruence theory for matroids, a version of Birkhoff’s Theorem for matroids is given which shows that every nontrivial matroid is a subdirect product of subdirectly irreducible matroids.