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In graph-theoretic terms, the theorem states that for a loopless planar graph, its chromatic number is ().. The intuitive statement of the four color theorem – "given any separation of a plane into contiguous regions, the regions can be colored using at most four colors so that no two adjacent regions have the same color" – needs to be interpreted appropriately to be correct.
The case = is trivial: a graph requires more than one color if and only if it has an edge, and that edge is itself a minor. The case = is also easy: the graphs requiring three colors are the non-bipartite graphs, and every non-bipartite graph has an odd cycle, which can be contracted to a 3-cycle, that is, a minor.
According to Jensen & Toft (1995), the problem was first formulated by Nelson in 1950, and first published by Gardner (1960). Hadwiger (1945) had earlier published a related result, showing that any cover of the plane by five congruent closed sets contains a unit distance in one of the sets, and he also mentioned the problem in a later paper (Hadwiger 1961).
The lead states: "In mathematics, the four color theorem, or the four color map theorem, states that given any separation of a plane into contiguous regions, called a map, the regions can be colored using at most four colors so that no two adjacent regions have the same color.
Typically, the set S has four elements (the four colours of the four colour theorem), and c is a proper colouring, that is, each pair of adjacent vertices in V are assigned distinct colours. With these additional conditions, a and b are two out of the four colours available, and every element of the ( a , b )-Kempe chain has neighbours in the ...
The theorem cannot be generalized to all nonplanar triangle-free graphs: not every nonplanar triangle-free graph is 3-colorable. In particular, the Grötzsch graph and the Chvátal graph are triangle-free graphs requiring four colors, and the Mycielskian is a transformation of graphs that can be used to construct triangle-free graphs that ...
The apparent triangles formed from the figures are 13 units wide and 5 units tall, so it appears that the area should be S = 13×5 / 2 = 32.5 units. However, the blue triangle has a ratio of 5:2 (=2.5), while the red triangle has the ratio 8:3 (≈2.667), so the apparent combined hypotenuse in each figure is actually bent. With the bent ...
An entirely different approach was needed for the much older problem of finding the number of colors needed for the plane or sphere, solved in 1976 as the four color theorem by Haken and Appel. On the sphere the lower bound is easy, whereas for higher genera the upper bound is easy and was proved in Heawood's original short paper that contained ...