The Four-Color Problem and Its Philosophical Significance (1979) [pdf](thatmarcusfamily.org)

The Four-Color Problem and Its Philosophical Significance (1979) [pdf]

http://www.thatmarcusfamily.org/philosophy/Course_Websites/Math_S08/Readings/tymoczko.pdf

1 comments

ggm5 ore fa

At the time, this was a debate around our family dining table with an old school mathematician who graduated in the 1940s who grew into the computing era and founded a school of computer science, and three offspring (myself included) studying maths and computer science arguing the case either side.

Pre pdf, printouts of the paper were on continuous paper and my memory is a lot of the exemplar map examples were included in the draft as an appendix, begging the question if anyone was seriously arguing they'd find errors by looking at them.

"What does a mathemantical proof mean when a machine writes it and a machine verifies it" was a reductive but unanswerable position. "It's not very satisfying" was the mood along with "expect a lot more of this in the future"