GRAPH

In order introduce the idea of a graph, we consider the following examples.

Architectural Floor Plans

The plan of the lower floor of a house is represented by

For small plans like this, such a diagram is very convenient for showing which rooms have
mutual access, but for large plans a less cumbersome representation is useful. One such
representation is to draw the rooms as small solid circles.
Such diagrams are known to architects as circulation diagrams, because of their use in analyzing
the movements of people in large buildings. In particular, they have been used in the designing
of airports, and in planning the layout of supermarkets. Such diagrams are useful in representing
the connections between the various rooms, but they do not give us any information about the
size or shape of the rooms.

Chemical Molecules
A chemical molecule consists of a number of atoms linked by chemical bonds. For example, a
molecule of water (H2O) consists of an oxygen atom bonded to two hydrogen atoms, and may be
represented by the diagram.

H O H

More complicated examples are given by the molecules of methane (CH 4), ethanol (C2H5OH),
and ethane (C2H4), that may be represented by the diagrams.

H H H
H H
H C H H C C O H C C
H H
H H H
Methane ethanol ethene

Pictures of this sort are often called structural diagrams. Note that they do not give us
any information about how the atoms are aligned in space; for example, the hydrogen atoms of
methane do not lie in a plane, but are situated at the vertices of a regular tetrahedron with the
carbon atom at the center. In spite of this, such diagrams are extremely useful in telling us how
the various atoms are connected, and we can obtain a lot of information about the chemical
behavior of a molecule by studying its structural diagram.
Electrical Networks
The following diagram present an electrical network containing two resistor, two capasitors, two
inductors, and voltage and current generator elements.

Diagram of this kind are very useful for illustrasing the way in which parts of the network are
connected. However, they do not give us any information about the geometrical features of the
network, such us the length and thickness of each wire and its position in space.
Three house A,B,and C, to three utilities, gas, water, and electricity.

We can represent the connections by means of the following graphs, where the vertices
correspond to the three house and the three utilities. Each of these graphs has six vertices and
nine edges, and both graphs convey the same information the three house are connected to each
of the three utilities, but not to each other. Thus, these two graph are the same. The utilities
problem is that of finding whether there is yet another graph which the same as these two, but in
which no two edges cross.

It follow from the above that a graph is determined as soon as we know its vertices. Once we
have this information, we can draw the graph and in principle, any picture we draw is as good as
any other. In other words, we can describe a graph completely by listing is vertices and edges in
any order, and the actual way in which the vertices and edges are drawn is relevant. For example,
the utilities graph map be described completely by the lists.
Vertices : A, B, C, g , w, e
Edges : Ag, Aw, Ae, Bg, Bw, Be, Cg, Cn, Ce.
We may equally well write these lists in a different order.
Vertices : w,C,B,e,g,A
Edges : gA, eA, eB, eC, wA, wB, wC