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Graph Dimension


The dimension e(G), also called the Euclidean dimension (e.g., Buckley and Harary 1988) of a graph, is the smallest dimension n of Euclidean n-space in which G can be embedded with every edge length equal to 1 and every vertex position distinct (but where edges may cross or overlap and points may lie on edges that are not incident on them; Erdős et al. 1965).

Any connected graph with maximum vertex degree Delta has graph dimension at most Delta, with the exception of the utility graph K_(3,3) (Frankl et al. 2018). Furthermore, any graph with chromatic number k has graph dimension at most 2k. This can be seen by partitioning the space into k orthogonal two-dimensional planes, then in each plane placing the vertices with one color on a circle with radius 1/sqrt(2) centred on the plane's origin (so all points have a squared norm of 1/2) (J. Tan, pers. comm., Oct. 26, 2021).

For any nonempty graph G, the graph Cartesian product satisfies

 e(G square K_2)={e(g)   if e(G)>=2; e(G)+1   if e(G)=0 or 1
(1)

(Erdős et al. 1965, Buckley and Harary 1988). While the theorem is stated as holding for "any" graph by both references, if G is taken as the empty graph K^__n, then K^__n square K_2 is isomorphic to the ladder rung graph nP_2. Yet e(K^__n)=1 for n>1 (since vertices may not overlap by the definition of graph dimension) and e(nP_2)=1 since each of the n paths can be placed on a 1-dimensional line.

The singleton graph K_1 has graph dimension e(K_1)=0, the path graphs P_n for n>1 have graph dimension e(P_n)=1, and in general, any graph with dimension 2 or less is said to be a unit-distance graph.

The dimension of the complete graph K_n is e(K_n)=n-1 (Erdős et al. 1965, Buckley and Harary 1988). For the complete bipartite graph K_(m,n) with <=n,

 e(K_(m,n))={1   for m=n=1; 2   for m=n=2 or m=1, n>1; 3   for m=2, n>2; 4   m,n>=3
(2)

(Erdős et al. 1965, Buckley and Harary 1988).

The dimension of K_n-e is given by e(K_n-e)=n-2 for n>=3 (Erdős et al. 1965).

The hypercube graph Q_n has dimension e(Q_n)=2 for n>=2 (Erdős et al. 1965).

The wheel graph W_n has graph dimension 2 for n=7 (and hence is unit-distance) and dimension 3 otherwise (and hence is not unit-distance) (Erdős et al. 1965, Buckley and Harary 1988).

The following table summarizes the graph dimensions for various families of parametrized graphs.


See also

Metric Dimension, Unit-Distance Graph

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References

Buckley, F. and Harary, F. "On the Euclidean Dimension of a Wheel." Graphs and Combin. 4, 23-30, 1988.Erdős, P.; Harary, F.; and Tutte, W. T. "On the Dimension of a Graph." Mathematika 12, 118-122, 1965.Frankl, N.; Kupavskii, A.; Swanepoel, K. J. "Embedding Graphs in Euclidean Space." 12 Feb 2018. https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.03092.

Cite this as:

Weisstein, Eric W. "Graph Dimension." From MathWorld--A Wolfram Web Resource. https://mathworld.wolfram.com/GraphDimension.html

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