I've been reading up on matroids recently, which are used in the theory of greedy algorithms. A matroid is a pair $(X, I)$ where $X$ is a set and $I \subseteq \wp(X)$ is a family of sets over $X$ called the independent sets in $X$.
It occurred to me that I'd seen the term "independent set" also used in a graph-theoretic context to refer to a set of nodes in a graph where no two nodes in the set are adjacent.
I'm not immediately seeing a connection between these two kinds of independent sets. Notably, in a matroid, all maximal independent sets are required to have the same cardinality, while in a graph theory context, it's possible for there to be many different maximal independent sets of differing cardinalities.
Is there a connection between these two concepts of "independent sets," or is the terminology just an accident of history?