A Group-Theoretic Method for Drawing Graphs Symmetrically

Constructing symmetric drawings of graphs is NP-hard. In this paper, we present a new method for drawing graphs symmetrically based on group theory. More formally, we define a n-geometric automorphism group of a graph that can be displayed as symmetries of a drawing of the graph in n dimensions. Then we present an algorithm to find all 2- and 3-geometric automorphism groups of a graph. We implement the algorithm using Magma [11] and the experimental results shows that our approach is very efficient in practice. We also present a drawing algorithm to display a 2- or 3-geometric automorphism group