The Tutte Graph
Three-regular, planar, non-hamiltonian and
three-connected.
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Three-regular:
every vertex (the blue points) has three neighbours (connected by lines, called edges)
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Planar:
The edges can be drawn in the plane without crossing each other.
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Non-hamiltonian:
There is no hamiltonian circuit: an ordering of the vertices so that
each two vertices in the sequence are connected and the first vertex is
connected to the last vertex in this ordering.
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Three-connected:
Removing any two vertices leaves the graph connected (there is a path
between each two vertices). But removing three vertices may result in a
disconnected graph.
First appeared in a paper "On Hamiltonian Circuits" by W.T. Tutte, in the
Journal of the London Mathematical Society, vol. 21, p. 98-101, in 1946.
It refuted a conjecture by P.G. Tait (see
"Remarks on the Colouring of Maps" in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, vol. 10, p. 729, 1880)
according to which every three-connected and three-regular graph is hamiltonian. This conjecture, if true, would
have implied the
Four-Colour Theorem
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