A senior presentation by Samantha Decker, Spring 2021

Abstract: Francis Guthrie was born in England in 1831. In 1852, Guthrie conjectured and tried to prove what we now know of today as the Four Color Theorem. He sent his work to his earlier mentor, Augustus de Morgan, who gave Guthrie the credit whenever this conjecture came up. It remained one of the most famous unsolved problems in topology and graph theory, until it was finally proven in 1976 by Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Hakenwith the help of a computer.