In the mathematical field of graph theory, a snark is an undirected graph with exactly three edges per vertex whose edges cannot be colored with only three colors. In order to avoid trivial cases, snarks are often restricted to have additional requirements on their connectivity and on the length of their cycles. Infinitely many snarks exist. One of the equivalent forms of the four color theorem is that every snark is a non-planar graph. Research on snarks originated in Peter G. Tait's work on the four color theorem in 1880, but their name is much newer, given to them by Martin Gardner in 1976. Beyond coloring, snarks also have connections to other hard problems in graph theory: writing in the Electronic Journal of Combinatorics, Miroslav Chladný and Martin Škoviera state that
In the study of various important and difficult problems in graph theory (such as the cycle double cover conjecture and the 5-flow conjecture), one encounters an interesting but somewhat mysterious variety of graphs called snarks. In spite of their simple definition...and over a century long investigation, their properties and structure are largely unknown. As well as the problems they mention, W. T. Tutte's snark conjecture concerns the existence of Petersen graphs as graph minors of snarks; its proof has been long announced but remains unpublished, and would settle a special case of the existence of nowhere zero 4-flows.
History and examples Snarks were so named by the American mathematician Martin Gardner in 1976, after the mysterious and elusive object of the poem The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll. However, the study of this class of graphs is significantly older than their name. Peter G. Tait initiated the study of snarks in 1880, when he proved that the four color theorem is equivalent to the statement that no snark is planar. The first graph known to be a snark was the Petersen graph; it was proved to be a snark by Julius Petersen in 1898, although it had already been studied for a different purpose by Alfred Kempe in 1886. The next four known snarks were
the Blanuša snarks (two with 18 vertices), discovered by Danilo Blanuša in 1946, the Descartes snark (210 vertices), discovered by Bill Tutte in 1948, and the Szekeres snark (50 vertices), discovered by George Szekeres in 1973. In 1975, Rufus Isaacs generalized Blanuša's method to construct two infinite families of snarks: the flower snarks and the Blanuša–Descartes–Szekeres snarks, a family that includes the two Blanuša snarks, the Descartes snark and the Szekeres snark. Isaacs also discovered a 30-vertex snark that does not belong to the Blanuša–Descartes–Szekeres family and that is not a flower snark: the double-star snark. Another infinite family, the Loupekine snarks, was published by Isaacs in 1976, credited to F. Loupekine. It includes two 22-vertex snarks derived from the Petersen graph. The 50-vertex Watkins snark was discovered in 1989. Another notable cubic non-three-edge-colorable graph is Tietze's graph, with 12 vertices; as Heinrich Franz Friedrich Tietze discovered in 1910, it forms the boundary of a subdivision of the Möbius strip requiring six colors. However, because it contains a triangle, it is not generally considered a snark. Under strict definitions of snarks, the smallest snarks are the Petersen graph and Blanuša snarks, followed by six different 20-vertex snarks. A list of all of the snarks up to 36 vertices (according to a strict definition), and up to 34 vertices (under a weaker definition), was generated by Gunnar Brinkmann, Jan Goedgebeur, Jonas Hägglund and Klas Markström in 2012. The number of snarks for a given even number of vertices grows at least exponentially in the number of vertices. (Because they have odd-degree vertices, all snarks must have an even number of vertices by the handshaking lemma.) OEIS sequence A130315 contains the number of non-trivial snarks of 2 n {\displaystyle 2n} vertices for small values of n {\displaystyle n} .
Definition The precise definition of snarks varies among authors, but generally refers to cubic graphs (having exactly three edges at each vertex) whose edges cannot be colored with only three colors. By Vizing's theorem, the number of colors needed for the edges of a cubic graph is either three ("class one" graphs) or four ("class two" graphs), so snarks are cubic graphs of class two. However, in order to avoid cases where a snark is of class two for trivial reasons, or is constructed in a trivial way from smaller graphs, additional restrictions on connectivity and cycle lengths are often imposed. In particular:
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