Foster Cage
The Foster cage is one of the four -cage graphs. Like the other
-cages, the Foster cage has 30 nodes.
It has 75 edges, diameter 3, girth 5, chromatic number
4, and is a quintic graph. Its LCF
signature is
,
with the two order-15 LCF embeddings illustrated above with a number of other embeddings.
None of the order-3 LCF embeddings have bilateral symmetry. A rotationally symmetric
embedding consisting of three copies of a quartic graph
with internal pentagram and external pentagon is also shown (E. Weisstein, Nov. 2,
2025).
The Foster cage is implemented in the Wolfram Language as GraphData["FosterCage"].
The automorphism group of the Foster cage has order 30.
The Foster cage satisfies the rhombus constraints and contains no known unit-distance forbidden subgraph, yet appears not to be a unit-distance. A number of embeddings found from different initial embeddings by minimizing the sum of square deviations from unit edge lengths until a local minimum was reached are illustrated above.
See also
Cage Graph, Foster Graph, Meringer Graph, Robertson-Wegner Graph, Wong GraphExplore with Wolfram|Alpha
References
House of Graphs. "Foster cage." https://houseofgraphs.org/graphs/48173.Meringer, M. "Fast Generation of Regular Graphs and Construction of Cages." J. Graph Th. 30, 137-146, 1999.Read, R. C. and Wilson, R. J. An Atlas of Graphs. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, p. 273, 1998.Referenced on Wolfram|Alpha
Foster CageCite this as:
Weisstein, Eric W. "Foster Cage." From MathWorld--A Wolfram Resource. https://mathworld.wolfram.com/FosterCage.html