A Colouring Problem!
Geometry
Level
3
The minimum number of distinct colours that are required to colour all the faces of a regular octahedron in such a manner that no two adjacent faces have the same colour is?
2
6
4
3
This section requires Javascript.
You are seeing this because something didn't load right. We suggest you, (a) try
refreshing the page, (b) enabling javascript if it is disabled on your browser and,
finally, (c)
loading the
non-javascript version of this page
. We're sorry about the hassle.
1 solution
Only 2 colours are sufficient to colour the regular octahedron. One can imagine an octahedron as two square pyramids with same base, as shown :-
Obviously, it is impossible to colour it with only 1 colour, but indeed if you observe closely, we can see that it can be coloured with only 2 distinct colours, by shading both the square pyramids in the way shown below:-