Per Hage, Frank Harary · 1983 (Calibre lists 1984; 2007 reissue) · PDF · Calibre ID 9870
Resurfaced in The Pattern Determines the Parts (2026-10-25).
Role in the triad
Formal ground: exact definitions (cutpoint, bridge, hamiltonian, eulerian) and the claim that graph theory is already in anthropology.
Why this book
Gives the vocabulary Moretti uses by eye and the best parallel for Perec’s hidden structure: New Hebrides sand drawings, which practise Euler’s theorem (one line, finger never lifted) without stating it. Insists the mathematics must be made explicit.
Quotations
Verified against the book’s own text on the day of the reading.
- “But classification according to structure is generally more important. And it is the same with ideas.” (epigraph, Peirce)
- “In theory the whole should be done in a single continuous line which ends where it began; the finger should never be lifted from the ground, nor should any part of the line be traversed twice” (p. 10, quoting Deacon 1934)
- “whatever the particular configurations may look like or represent, they are eulerian; that is, they are connected and all points have even degree.” (p. 12)
- “Euler replaced each land area by a point and each bridge by a line joining the corresponding points, thereby producing the first published graph theoretic model.” (p. 12)
- “graph theory is such a congenial mode of anthropological thought that if Euler had not discovered it, some anthropologist might very well have.” (p. 13)
- “A cutpoint of a connected graph is one whose removal (together with its incident lines) disconnects it” (p. 19)
- “If a graph G has a spanning cycle Z, then G is called a hamiltonian graph and Z is a hamiltonian cycle.” (p. 26)
- “the individuals and relations represented by cutpoints and bridges would presumably be of fundamental importance in the group.” (p. 29)
Themes
bridge · cutpoint · Euler · eulerian · graph theory · hamiltonian · implicit mathematics · Klein group · Königsberg · Lévi-Strauss · Peirce · sand drawings · structural anthropology