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Five Color Theorem
By Christie Watters and Rita Inamdar
The Four Color Problem
It is possible to color any map with only four colors so that no two adjacent regions will be the same color.
History
1852 Francis Guthrie colored a map of England with only four colors Augustus De Morgan a math professor at the University College London began to study the problem. 1878 Arthur Cayley brought the question before the London Mathematical Society. 1879 Alfred Bray Kempe came up with a proof of this theorem which was published in the American Journal of Mathematics. 1890 Percy John Heawood while studying at Oxford found a couter example to Kempes proof but not the 4-color theorem.
History Cont.
Throughout the 20th century mathematicians working on what was now called the four color conjecture for cubic maps. Now mathematicians attempted to solve the four color conjecture by finding an an avoidable set S of reducible configurations. 1976 Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken wrote a computer program that constructed 1936 reducible configurations, thus proving the four color problem!
+ Map and a corresponding plane graph
Kempe Chains
Heawood Map
Heawood Map
Heawood Map
5 Color Theorem
Every Planar graph is 5-colorable.
Proof: Let n be the order of the planar graph G. It is obvious that the theorem is true for 1 n 5. We will prove this theorem by induction on n. Lets Assume every planar graph of order n-1 is 5-colorable, where n 6. We will show that G is 5-colorable.
5 Color Theorem
Corollary 6.6: Every planar graph contains a vertex of degree 5 or less.
Therefore G contains a vertex, v such that the deg v 5.
G-v is a planar graph of order n-1,therefore our induction hypothesis states that G-v is 5-colorable. Let there be a 5-coloring of G-v, where the colors used are denoted by 1,2,3,4,5.
+ 5 Color Theorem
If one of these colors in not used to color the neighbors of v, it can be used to color v. This produces a 5 coloring of G. So lets assume all 5 colors are used to color the neighbors of G.
5 Color Theorem
Let there be a planar embedding of G and suppose that v1,v2,v3,v4,v5 are the neighbors of v arranged cyclically about v where vi has been assigned the color i with 1 i 5.
v1
v2 v3 v4
v5
Let H be a subgraph of G-v induced by the set of vertices colored 1 or 3. Therefore v1,v3 V(H). If v1 and v3 belong to different components of H then we can interchange the colors of the vertices in H1 containing v1. This produces a 5-coloring of G by assigning color 1 to v.
H: v3
But wait! Suppose that v1 and v3 are in the same component. (There is a v1-v3 path, P, in G-v.) The path P and the path (v1, v, v3) create a cycle in G. This will cause either v2 or both v4 and v5 to be enclosed.
Therefore there is no v2-v4 path in G-v. v1 v2 v3 v5 v4
Let F be the subgraph of G-v induced by the set of vertices colored 2 or 4 and let F2 be the component of F containing v2. Therefore v4 V(F2), and by interchanging the colors of the vertices of F2, a 5-coloring of G can be produced by assigning the color 2 to v.
v2 F: v5 v1 v2 v3
v4
v4
Bibliography
Chartrand, Gary, Linda Lesniak, and Ping Zhang. Graphs & Digraphs. Boca Raton, FL: CRC, 2011. Print.
Kainen, Paul C. "A Generalization of the 5-color Theorem." Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society. Web. 15 Apr. 2012. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/2039977?seq=1>.
"Nature of Mathematics." Nature of Mathematics. Web. 18 Apr. 2012. <http://natureofmathematics.wordpress.com/lecturenotes/four-and-five-color-theorems/>.
