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Intuitive things to help understand direction of the proof

- Four colors are necessary if and only if four regions are all bordering one another. This follows
for any number of colors.
- Whenever four regions all share borders, one will inevitably be trapped inside the others. As a
result, a fifth one could not possibly touch all of them.
- Trying to have five regions all bordering one another is the same as trying to make five points all
connect to each-other with non-overlapping lines. (You could just “thicken” the points and lines
into the shapes of the regions)

The Proof
*I’ve included drawings to help visualization, but keep in mind that the specific arrangement of
the points or the lines connecting them need not matter*

- Let there exist some map that requires 5 colors


- Then there exists 5 regions that are all touching each other at once
- Therefore we can mark a point in each region (A, B, C, D, E) and draw non-overlapping lines that
connect all of the points to each other, where the lines cross through the corresponding borders

Let’s just look at the points and lines that connect A, B, C, and D for now.

- A, B, C, and D are all connected to one another with non-overlapping lines


- Therefore there exists some region ABCD formed by lines A to B, B to C, C to D, and D back to A.

- There is a line that connects A and C

Case 1: This line travels within the region ABCD

- Thus, we have split the region ABCD into two small regions (ABC and ADC)
- Since all the points are connected, there exists a line that connects B and D
- This line must travel outside ABCD since it must travel outside regions ABC and ADC
- Thus we have created a larger shape that contains ABC and ADC
- This larger shape is either ABD or BCD, we will suppose it is ABD, similar arguments would follow
otherwise.
- ABD contains ABCD< therefore point C is inside region ABD (this would not be the case if C were
on the perimeter, but C cannot be on the perimeter since these lines do not overlap)
- We now have a big region ABD comprised of three smaller ones ABC, BCD, and ADC

Now let’s look back at point E.

- If point E is in region ABC, it can’t reach point D without crossing a line. (Similar arguments for
regions ABD and ADC for points C and B respectively)
- If point E is outside of the large region ABD, it can’t reach point C without crossing a line.
- Therefore, there cannot exist a point E that connects to all of the other points
- Then there cannot be 5 regions touching each other all at once and there does not exist some
map that needs five colors.

Case 2: The line that connects A to C travels outside the region ABCD
- Thus we have created a larger region that contains ABCD
- This larger shape is either ACD or ABD, we will suppose it is ACD. Similar arguments would
follow otherwise.

- We now have a large region (ACD) comprised of two small ones (ABC and ABCD)
- Since all the points are connected, there exists a line that connect B and D
- Point B is contained, therefore the line must travel through region ABCD to get to D
- We now have a big region (ACD) comprised of three smaller ones (ABC, ABD, BCD).

Now let’s look back at point E

- If point E is in region ABC, it can’t reach point D without crossing a line. (Similar arguments
follow for regions ABD and BCD for points C and A respectively)
- If point E is outside of the large region ACD, it can’t reach point B without crossing a line
- Therefore, there cannot exist a point E that connects to all of the other points
- Then there cannot be 5 regions touching each other all at once and there does not exist some
map that needs five colors.

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