thrackle

English

Etymology

Scots term for a fouled fishing line, which Conway heard when visiting Scotland.

Noun

thrackle (plural thrackles)

1. (graph theory) An embedding of a graph in the plane, such that each edge is a Jordan arc and every pair of edges meet once.
   • 2016, Grace Misereh, Yuri Nikolayevsky, “Thrackles containing a standard musquash”, in arXiv‎^[1]:

     We prove that a thrackle drawing containing a standard musquash (standard n-gonal thrackle) cannot contain any other cycle of length three or five.

References

• Dan Archdeacon, thrackle. https://web.archive.org/web/20161009092436/http://www.cems.uvm.edu/TopologicalGraphTheoryProblems/thrackle.htm