Descartes snark

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Descartes snark
Descartes snark.png
Image of a Descartes snark.
Named after Blanche Descartes
Vertices 210
Edges 315
Girth 5
Chromatic index 4
Properties Cubic
Snark
Table of graphs and parameters

In the mathematical field of graph theory, a Descartes snark is an undirected graph with 210 vertices and 315 edges. It is a snark, first discovered by William Tutte in 1948 under the pseudonym Blanche Descartes. [1]

A Descartes snark is obtained from the Petersen graph by replacing each vertex with a nonagon and each edge with a particular graph closely related to the Petersen graph. Because there are multiple ways to perform this procedure, there are multiple Descartes snarks.

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Petersen graph Cubic graph with 10 vertices and 15 edges

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Generalized Petersen graph

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Blanche Descartes was a collaborative pseudonym used by the English mathematicians R. Leonard Brooks, Arthur Harold Stone, Cedric Smith, and W. T. Tutte. The four mathematicians met in 1935 as undergraduate students at Trinity College, Cambridge, where they joined the Trinity Mathematical Society and began meeting together to work on mathematical problems.

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In graph theory, the Petersen family is a set of seven undirected graphs that includes the Petersen graph and the complete graph K6. The Petersen family is named after Danish mathematician Julius Petersen, the namesake of the Petersen graph.

The Petersen Graph is a mathematics book about the Petersen graph and its applications in graph theory. It was written by Derek Holton and John Sheehan, and published in 1993 by the Cambridge University Press as volume 7 in their Australian Mathematical Society Lecture Series.

References

  1. Descartes, Blanche. "Network Colorings," The Mathematical Gazette (London, 32:299. p. 67–69, 1948.