🚀 go-pugleaf

McGill wrote:
> 
> The four coloured - map problem was solved in 1976 at the University of
> Illinois. It was as follows: any map can be coloured with only four colours
> and no country or state sharing a boundry will have the same colour.
>         Who proposed this problem?

Francis Guthrie, whose brother communicated it to Augustus De Morgan
in October, 1852.  The first published reference to the problem
was a query by Cayley in 1878, asking whether it had been solved.

This from _The Four-Color Problem_, by Saaty and Kainen (McGraw-Hill,
1977).

NOTE: Try to keep this out of sight of Archie Pu or we'll be subjected
to another thread about it.  You think the meower battles are tedious?
Just wait.


Regards,

Rick

-----------------------------------------------------
Rick Decker                   rdecker@hamilton.edu
Department of Comp. Sci.      315-859-4785
Hamilton College
Clinton, NY  13323            =  !=  ==  (!)
-----------------------------------------------------

From "Graph Theory" by Ronald Gould

First paragraph of Section 8.5  The Four Color Theorem

"The idea of coloring can be traced to Francis Guthrie. In 1852, while he
was a student of Augustus De Morgan, Guthrie asked De Morgan to verify the
"fact" that any map (consider it a map of countries if you wish) drawn in
the plane could be colored with at most four colors, so that adjacent (that
is, sharing a boundary) countries received different colors. De Morgan
responded by saying he did not know that this was a "fact," and he
proceeded to ask other mathematicians (like Hamilton) about this problem.
Both Guthrie and De Morgan believed this statement was indeed a fact, yet
neither could verify it."