Coloring a Hypercube

Geometry Level pending

What is the minimum number of colors needed to color the vertices of a 15-dimensional hypercube such that no two vertices connected by an edge have the same color?


The answer is 2.

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1 solution

Jackson Abascal
Feb 7, 2015

Every hypercube of dimension greater than or equal to one can be colored with 2 2 colors. An informal proof of induction is as follows. A one dimensional hypercube (a line segment) can be colored with 2 2 colors, but not 1 1 . Every hypercube of dimension n + 1 n+1 can be made by 'stitching together' the corresponding vertices of a hypercube of dimension n n . If you invert the vertice colors of one of the two n n -dimensional hypercubes you're joining together then your final hypercube of dimension n + 1 n+1 is also colored appropriately. This process is perhaps best explained in the picture.

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