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
William Thomas Tutte OC FRS FRSC (; 14 May 1917 – 2 May 2002) was an English and Canadian codebreaker and mathematician. During the Second World War, he made a brilliant and fundamental advance in cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher, a maj ...
in 1948 under the pseudonym
Blanche Descartes
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, ...
.
[Descartes, Blanche. ]
Network Colorings
" ''The Mathematical Gazette'' (London, 32:299. p. 67–69, 1948.
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.
References
Graph families
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