Five-coloring plane graphs

Abstract

Plane graphs and their colorings have been the subject of intensive research since the beginnings of graph theory because of their connection to the fourcolor problem. As stated originally the four-color problem asked whether it is always possible to color the regions of a plane map with four colors such that regions which share a common boundary (and not just a point) receive different colors. The figure on the right shows that coloring the regions of a map is really the same task as coloring the vertices of a plane graph. As in Chapter 13 (page 89) place a vertex in the interior of each region (including the outer region) and connect two such vertices belonging to neighboring regions by an edge through the common boundary.