The dimension ,
also called the Euclidean dimension (e.g., Buckley and Harary 1988) of a graph, is
the smallest dimension
of Euclidean
-space
in which
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
has graph dimension at most
, with the exception of the utility
graph
(Frankl et al. 2018). Furthermore, any graph with chromatic
number
has graph dimension at most
. This can be seen by partitioning the space into
orthogonal two-dimensional planes, then in each plane placing
the vertices with one color on a circle with radius
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 ,
the graph Cartesian product satisfies
(1)
|
(Erdős et al. 1965, Buckley and Harary 1988). While the theorem is stated as holding for "any" graph by both references, if is taken as the empty graph
, then
is isomorphic to the ladder
rung graph
.
Yet
for
(since vertices may not overlap by the definition of graph dimension) and
since each of the
paths can be placed on a 1-dimensional line.
The singleton graph has graph dimension
, the path graphs
for
have graph dimension
, and in general, any graph with dimension 2 or less
is said to be a unit-distance graph.
The dimension of the complete graph is
(Erdős et al. 1965, Buckley and Harary
1988). For the complete bipartite graph
with
,
(2)
|
(Erdős et al. 1965, Buckley and Harary 1988).
The dimension of
is given by
for
(Erdős et al. 1965).
The hypercube graph has dimension
for
(Erdős et al. 1965).
The wheel graph has graph dimension 2 for
(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.