Some geometrical aspects of a maximal three-coloured triangle-free graph

Abstract

A three-coloured triangle-free complete graph with 16 vertices is constructed in an ad hoc manner. The edges of one colour in the complete graph, with the 16 vertices, form a Greenwood-Gleason graph, which can be regarded as the edges and diagonals of a hypercube in four dimensions, and which also has a representation as a graph in five dimensions all of whose automorphisms are isometries. In the complete graph, the blue edges form 40 quadrilaterals; 20 of these have red diagonals, and these 20 “red quadrilaterals,” meeting along 40 edges and at 16 vertices, represent a topological surface of characteristic −4, a Klein bottle with two handles. This surface can be represented using a tessellation of regular quadrilaterals in the hyperbolic plane. To obtain the only other three-coloured triangle-free complete graph with 16 vertices some of the blue and red edges are interchanged in a way that can be described very simply using either the surface of characteristic −4 or the hyperbolic tessellation.