In mathematics, a universal graph is an infinite

graph Graph may refer to: Mathematics *Graph (discrete mathematics), a structure made of vertices and edges **Graph theory, the study of such graphs and their properties *Graph (topology), a topological space resembling a graph in the sense of discre ...

that contains ''every'' finite (or at-most-

countable In mathematics, a set is countable if either it is finite or it can be made in one to one correspondence with the set of natural numbers. Equivalently, a set is ''countable'' if there exists an injective function from it into the natural numbers ...

) graph as an induced subgraph. A universal graph of this type was first constructed by

Richard Rado Richard Rado FRS (28 April 1906 – 23 December 1989) was a German-born British mathematician whose research concerned combinatorics and graph theory. He was Jewish and left Germany to escape Nazi persecution. He earned two PhDs: in 1933 from th ...

and is now called the

Rado graph In the mathematical field of graph theory, the Rado graph, Erdős–Rényi graph, or random graph is a countably infinite graph that can be constructed (with probability one) by choosing independently at random for each pair of its vertices whe ...

or random graph. More recent work has focused on universal graphs for a graph family : that is, an infinite graph belonging to ''F'' that contains all finite graphs in . For instance, the Henson graphs are universal in this sense for the -clique-free graphs. A universal graph for a family of graphs can also refer to a member of a sequence of finite graphs that contains all graphs in ; for instance, every finite tree is a subgraph of a sufficiently large

hypercube graph In graph theory, the hypercube graph is the graph formed from the vertices and edges of an -dimensional hypercube. For instance, the cube graph is the graph formed by the 8 vertices and 12 edges of a three-dimensional cube. has vertices, e ...

so a hypercube can be said to be a universal graph for trees. However it is not the smallest such graph: it is known that there is a universal graph for -vertex trees, with only vertices and edges, and that this is optimal. A construction based on the

planar separator theorem In graph theory, the planar separator theorem is a form of isoperimetric inequality for planar graphs, that states that any planar graph can be split into smaller pieces by removing a small number of vertices. Specifically, the removal of verti ...

can be used to show that -vertex planar graphs have universal graphs with edges, and that bounded-degree planar graphs have universal graphs with edges. It is also possible to construct universal graphs for planar graphs that have vertices. Sumner's conjecture states that

tournaments A tournament is a competition involving at least three competitors, all participating in a sport or game. More specifically, the term may be used in either of two overlapping senses: # One or more competitions held at a single venue and concentr ...

are universal for

polytree In mathematics, and more specifically in graph theory, a polytree (also called directed tree, oriented tree; . or singly connected network.) is a directed acyclic graph whose underlying undirected graph is a tree. In other words, if we replace its ...

s, in the sense that every tournament with vertices contains every polytree with vertices as a subgraph. A family of graphs has a universal graph of polynomial size, containing every -vertex graph as an

induced subgraph In the mathematical field of graph theory, an induced subgraph of a graph is another graph, formed from a subset of the vertices of the graph and ''all'' of the edges (from the original graph) connecting pairs of vertices in that subset. Defini ...

, if and only if it has an adjacency labelling scheme in which vertices may be labeled by -bit bitstrings such that an algorithm can determine whether two vertices are adjacent by examining their labels. For, if a universal graph of this type exists, the vertices of any graph in may be labeled by the identities of the corresponding vertices in the universal graph, and conversely if a labeling scheme exists then a universal graph may be constructed having a vertex for every possible label. In older mathematical terminology, the phrase "universal graph" was sometimes used to denote a

complete graph In the mathematical field of graph theory, a complete graph is a simple undirected graph in which every pair of distinct vertices is connected by a unique edge. A complete digraph is a directed graph in which every pair of distinct vertices is ...

. The notion of universal graph has been adapted and used for solving mean payoff games.

References

External links

The panarborial formula
"Theorem of the Day" concerning universal graphs for trees {{DEFAULTSORT:Universal Graph Graph families Infinite graphs