Some shapes are made of dots and lines.
This shape has ten dots. It also has many lines. The lines connect the dots. It is a very special shape. Can you see the lines?
Imagine dots joined by lines.
This shape has ten dots. It also has fifteen lines. A man named Julius Petersen found it. He used it to solve puzzles.
It is a very special shape. Some shapes can be drawn flat. This one cannot be drawn without lines crossing. You can also color its dots with three colors.
No two dots of the same color touch. It is a famous shape in math.
Imagine dots joined by lines. In math, we call these dots vertices. The lines are called edges. The Petersen graph is a famous shape in graph theory. It has ten vertices and fifteen edges.
A man named Julius Petersen studied it in 1898. This shape is very special to math experts. It often acts as a counterexample. A counterexample is a shape that proves a guess is wrong.
Many people make optimistic guesses about how shapes work. This graph often shows those guesses are not true. It is also hard to draw flat. You cannot draw it without lines crossing each other. The best way to draw it has only two crossings.
You can also color its parts. You can color the vertices using three colors. No two dots of the same color will touch. But coloring the edges is harder. You need four colors for the edges.
This makes it a snark. A snark is a special type of graph. The Petersen graph is the smallest snark in existence.
Imagine a web of dots joined by lines. In math, we call these dots vertices and the lines edges. The Petersen graph is a very famous shape in a field called graph theory. It has ten vertices and fifteen edges.
This small shape is a powerful tool for mathematicians. It often acts as a counterexample. A counterexample is a shape that proves a guess is wrong. It shows that many optimistic predictions about graphs are not actually true.
This graph is tricky to draw on a flat piece of paper. It is nonplanar, which means you cannot draw it without lines crossing. You might see a drawing with five crossings in a star shape. However, you can draw it with only two crossings.
If you use a special surface called a torus, you can draw it with no crossings at all. You can even draw it on a projective plane without any lines overlapping. It is also a unit distance graph. This means you can draw it so every edge has the exact same length.
History shows us this shape has been around for a long time. Julius Petersen is credited with studying it in 1898. He used it to show a specific problem about coloring edges. But the shape appeared even earlier in a paper from 1886. A mathematician named Kempe noticed its connection to other math ideas. He saw that its dots could represent lines in a special pattern. This shows that even simple shapes have deep roots in history.
There are many specific facts that make this graph unique. It is the smallest cubic graph with no Hamiltonian cycle. A Hamiltonian cycle is a path that visits every dot exactly once and returns home. Even though it has no full cycle, it does have a Hamiltonian path.
The graph is also very symmetrical. You can move the dots and lines around and the shape stays the same. It is one of only 13 cubic distance-regular graphs. This makes it a very rare and special object.
Coloring is another way to understand how this graph works. You can color the vertices using only three colors. You must make sure no two dots of the same color touch.
Coloring the edges is much harder. You need four different colors for the edges. This special property makes it a snark. The Petersen graph is the smallest snark that mathematicians have found. It connects many different ideas in the world of math.
The Petersen graph is a fundamental object in the mathematical field of graph theory. It is an undirected graph consisting of 10 vertices and 15 edges. In this context, vertices are the points or dots, and edges are the lines connecting them. This small configuration is highly significant because it serves as a versatile tool for mathematicians. It often functions as a counterexample to disprove optimistic predictions about graph properties.
To understand its structure, we can view it as a Kneser graph, specifically KG(5,2). This means the graph has one vertex for every possible 2-element subset of a 5-element set. Two vertices are connected by an edge if and only if their corresponding subsets are disjoint. This construction also makes it an example of an odd graph. Geometrically, the Petersen graph can be seen as a hemi-dodecahedron. This is a shape formed by taking a dodecahedron and identifying opposite points, lines, and faces together.
One of the most notable features of the Petersen graph is its nonplanarity. A planar graph is one that can be drawn on a flat plane without any edges crossing. Because the Petersen graph is nonplanar, any drawing on a flat surface must have crossings. While a common symmetric drawing shows five crossings, the crossing number of the graph is actually 2. This means there is a way to draw it with only two edge crossings.
Additionally, it is 1-planar, meaning each edge is crossed at most once in a specific drawing. It is also a unit distance graph, which allows it to be drawn with all edges having equal length.
The history of this graph involves several important mathematical discoveries. Julius Petersen is credited with its study in 1898. He used it to construct the smallest bridgeless cubic graph that lacks a three-edge-coloring. However, the graph appeared earlier in 1886 in a paper by Kempe. Kempe observed that its vertices could represent the ten lines of the Desargues configuration. In this view, edges represent pairs of lines that do not meet at one of the ten points. This shows how the graph links different geometric concepts together.
Symmetry is a defining characteristic of the Petersen graph. It is a strongly regular graph with a specific signature. It is also symmetric, meaning it is both edge-transitive and vertex-transitive. More specifically, it is 3-arc-transitive, so every directed three-edge path can be transformed into any other through symmetry. Despite this high degree of symmetry, it is not a Cayley graph. In fact, it holds the distinction of being the smallest vertex-transitive graph that is not a Cayley graph.
Coloring properties provide further insight into its complexity. The chromatic number of the graph is 3, meaning its vertices can be colored with three colors so no connected vertices share a color.
However, the chromatic index is 4, meaning its edges require four colors. This property makes the Petersen graph a snark. It is the smallest possible snark known to mathematicians. This classification is important because the snark theorem states that every snark contains the Petersen graph as a minor.
Finally, the graph is famous for its relationship with Hamiltonian paths and cycles. A Hamiltonian cycle is a path that visits every vertex exactly once and returns to the start. The Petersen graph has a Hamiltonian path, but it has no Hamiltonian cycle. It is the smallest bridgeless cubic graph to lack such a cycle. It is also described as hypo-Hamiltonian. This means that if you delete any single vertex, the remaining graph becomes Hamiltonian. This unique behavior makes it a vital counterexample in the study of connectivity and paths.
Where will your curiosity go next?
🖼️ Images & Media (8)
More to explore
✨ What else?
Related topics you might enjoy
🔬 Go deeper
More advanced topics to explore
🪜 Step back
Simpler topics to build understanding
What is Nepedia?
A free, ad-free encyclopedia for children. Every article is written at five reading levels, so the same page works for a five-year-old and a fifteen-year-old — use the level switcher above to see this one change. No account needed to read.