This is a theorem, which states that given any plane separated into regions, such as a political map of the states of a country, the regions may be colored using no more than four colors in such a way that no two adjacent regions receive the same color.
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The proof was given by N. Robertson, D. P. Sanders, P. D. Seymour and R. Thomas in 1996. It can be found at: http://www.ams.org/era/1996-02-01/S1079-6762-96-00003-0/S1079-6762-96-00003-0.pdf
It can be interesting to think how many colours do we need in n-dimension where n>2.
Shlomo, thanks for the refinement.
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The four color map coloring theorem was proved in 1996 and the proof was verified again in 2004, as far as I know.
The biggest controversy about it was that the proof involved computing...
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