Matroids and the Moduli Space of Abelian Varieties

Inspired by recent work calculating the top weight cohomology of the moduli space $\mathcal{A}_g$ of principally polarized abelian varieties of dimension $g$ for small values of $g$, I will discuss a connection between matroids and compactifications of $\mathcal{A}_g$ that is anlogous to the connection between graphs and compactifications of the moduli space of curves. Given time I will also discuss recent work computing the homology of various matroid complexes.