The Four Color Map Theorem - Numberphile
This video supported by Squarespace: https://www.squarespace.com/numberphile The Four Color Map Theorem (or colour!?) was a long-standing problem until it was cracked in 1976 using a "new"...
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So let's talk about the four color theorem! It's a favorite with mathematicians. It's easy to state, so the statement is, every map can be colored using four colors, such that two neighboring countries are different colors. That would be confusing if it wasn't. So all maps can be done in four colors. In other words I'm saying there are no maps that need five colors. It's not obvious, and you'd think more complicated maps would need more colors, but apparently all maps can be done with just four colors or better. So this problem was unsolved for a long time. 125 years, it was unsolved. It was solved finally in the 1970s, although the method they used to solve it was a little controversial at the time, but has had a large effec...
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So let's talk about the four color theorem! It's a favorite with mathematicians. It's easy to state, so the statement is, every map can be colored using four colors, such that two neighboring countries are different colors. That would be confusing if it wasn't. So all maps can be done in four colors. In other words I'm saying there are no maps that need five colors. It's not obvious, and you'd think more complicated maps would need more colors, but apparently all maps can be done with just four colors or better. So this problem was unsolved for a long time. 125 years, it was unsolved. It was solved finally in the 1970s, although the method they used to solve it was a little controversial at the time, but has had a large effec...
