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Asymmetric graph

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Graph families defined by their automorphisms
distance-transitive distance-regular strongly regular
symmetric (arc-transitive) t-transitive, t ≥ 2 skew-symmetric
(if connected)
vertex- and edge-transitive
edge-transitive and regular edge-transitive
vertex-transitive regular (if bipartite)
biregular
Cayley graph zero-symmetric asymmetric
The 8 6-vertex asymmetric graphs
The Frucht graph, the smallest asymmetric cubic graph.

In graph theory, a branch of mathematics, an undirected graph is called an asymmetric graph if it has no nontrivial symmetries.

Formally, an automorphism of a graph is a permutation p of its vertices with the property that any two vertices u and v are adjacent if and only if p(u) and p(v) are adjacent. The identity mapping of a graph onto itself is always an automorphism, and is called the trivial automorphism of the graph. An asymmetric graph is a graph for which there are no other automorphisms.

The smallest asymmetric non-trivial graphs have 6 vertices. The smallest asymmetric cubic graph is the Frucht graph discovered in 1938.[1][2] According to a strengthened version of Frucht's theorem, there are infinitely many asymmetric cubic graphs.

The proportion of graphs on n vertices with nontrivial automorphism tends to zero as n grows, which is informally expressed as "almost all finite graphs are asymmetric".[3] In contrast, again informally, "almost all infinite graphs are symmetric".[4] More specifically, countable infinite random graphs in the Erdős–Rényi model are, with probability 1, isomorphic to the highly symmetric Rado graph.

References

  1. ^ Frucht, R. (1938), "Herstellung von Graphen mit vorgegebener abstrakter Gruppe.", Compositio Mathematica (in German), 6: 239–250, ISSN 0010-437X, Zbl 0020.07804.
  2. ^ Skiena, S. Implementing Discrete Mathematics: Combinatorics and Graph Theory with Mathematica. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1990
  3. ^ "Algebraic Graph Theory", by Christopher David Godsil, Gordon Royle (2001) ISBN 0387952209
  4. ^ Erdős, P.; Rényi, A. (1963), "Asymmetric graphs" (PDF), Acta Mathematica Hungarica, 14 (3): 295–315, doi:10.1007/BF01895716