Snark

Jan 6, 2020 | Hinsdale

Although "snark" is defined as "(of a person, words, or a mood) sharply critical; cutting; snide," in math, it means something a little different.

When graphing a mathematical snark, the working definition is "a graph in which every vertex has three neighbors, the connectivity is redundant so that removing no one edge would split the graph, and the edges cannot be colored by only three colors without two edges of the same color meeting at a point."

It looks like this:

It is called the Petersen snark, the smallest snark there is!

A more complex snark might look like this:

This is called a flower snark, which is part of the "infinite family" since you can just keep adding more and more points to connect.,

You can learn more about the different kinds of snarks here!