Regenerative Medicine Special Seminar

The Hadwiger-Nelson problem is to determine the number of colours required to colour the Euclidean plane such that any two points which are unit distance apart have different colours. It has been known since the 1950's that this number is between four and seven, and a good number of mathematicians, including Paul Erdős, have attempted to improve this bound with no success. Last week however, Aubrey de Grey stunned the mathematical community with an elementary construction which bumps the lower bound up to five. We will give a historical overview of the Hadwiger-Nelson problem, and then present a sketch of de Grey's construction. No background is necessary