Product Description

A book to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the solution to one of the world's most puzzling mathematical problems. The four-colour theorem states that every map in the world can be coloured with just four colours in such a way that neighbouring countries have different colours. One of the simplest problems to state, one of the hardest to solve, which took a century for mathematicians to prove. This book introduces the mathematicians behind the mathematics, among them a bishop, an astronomer, a botanist, an obsessive golfer and a bridegroom who spend his honeymoon colouring maps.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #343453 in Books
• Published on: 2003-08-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
At first glance Four Colours Suffice seems like such an easy thing to prove. However big and complicated the map, four colours are enough to distinguish each country from its neighbours. How do we prove that only four colours are needed? Once we realise that, if four countries all share borders with each other, then one country must be enclosed by the other three (try it), we seem to be most of the way there. But things turned out to be not quite so simple. Robin Wilson might balk at the idea that his sardonic and lively account of the problem and its solution is in any way farcical--as, indeed, might the dedicated mathematicians and keen amateurs whose 150 years of work he describes. But if the way an apparently simple problem throws out poisoned blossoms of complication, confusion and embarrassment is your definition of farce, then this story surely fits the bill. Proving the four-colour conjecture turned out to be heinously difficult, and has at last been achieved--and that in the ugliest way imaginable--only with the aid of a computer.

This, we can see now, was a landmark moment in mathematics: the moment we realised that there are proofs out there so complicated, that publishing them in full is impractical, working through them by hand is impossible, and explaining them to the public requires writers of a very special stamp indeed. (Robin Wilson, I should add, is most definitely one of them.) The publishers, in deciding to make a black-and-white book out of a colour problem, have not only done justice to Wilson's illustrations, but have also created one of the most visually arresting science books around. --Simon Ings

About the Author
Robin Wilson is Senior Lecturer in Mathematics at the Open University and Fellow of Keble College, Oxford.

Customer Reviews

Quite simply, the best mathematics book I've ever read...
...if not the best book I've ever read!

Robin Wilson does an amazing job at describing the history of the four-colour theorem, from conception, through various attempts at proving it, past a few failed proofs (including Kempe's proof - which was only shown as defective over ten years after he published it), and onto Appel and Haken's proof. The thing that makes this book stand out from so many other 'light reading' mathematics books is the balance between biographical information and mathematics (the interesting stuff!). I would say that the majority of the book is maths-based, and the biographical content tends to be kept relevant to the 'storyline'.

You'll definitely want to be at least a little mathematically minded if you're going to enjoy this book - but, before long, you'll find it very easy to at least prove that five colours suffice... :)

Excellent
On the surface the four colour theorem may seem like a dull story for a book like this. But Robin Wilson does a great job of making this a fascinating story. I was hooked from the start. It doesn't get too technical but nevertheless you do get an idea, though perhaps not a complete understanding, of how and why the proof worked. A great read for any 'popular science' fan. If you enjoy Simon Singh, Ian Stewart and the like, you'll like this too.

Accessible to Some
Robin Wilson had a hard job. The story of how the Four Colour Theorum was solved is painstakingly intricate to explain to other mathmaticians. To try and explain it to "ordinary" laymen is a phenominal task, almost as tricky as the theory itself!

Unsurprisingly and understandably, Wilson slips up occasionally. Sometimes he doesn't give enough detail and explains obvious terms; often he presumes we understand more calculus than we do. For this reason, people with a very mathmatical brain and further education in mathmatics would find this book easier to cope with than other people just looking for a good read.

Wilson is every bit a mathmatician, which is noticeable in every aspect of the book. He writes in rather a scattered order: nearly every page talks about something "we will see later in Chapter X" or something "as we have already seen in Chapter X" and so the flow of the book is constantly disrupted. Because of the mathmatical aspect, the vocabulary used isn't exactly mind-blowing or particularly emotive. But then, if you want wonderful writing, you buy a novel.

That said, it is easy to see why this subject has excited mathmaticians past and present. One train of thought he didn't pursue (confusingly, to my mind) was that the pinicle of the book - the "solution" to the problem - may not be a solution at all. He talks of how other mathmaticians "solved" the problem in the past, and of how these solutions were disproved years later. In the case of Kempe, his solution was disproved a full eleven years after it was published. Given this information, and after learning of other mathmaticians rejection of the most recent "proof", I was surprised to read of Wilson's refusal to admit that this new solution may well be disproved in the future.

This is the kind of book, which urges you to grab a pen, paper and four coloured pencils, just to see if you can out-smart the world's best mathmaticians of the previous 150 years...

... and I'm still colouring...