In the summer of 1976 Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken of the University of Illinois announced that they had solved the Four-Color Problem. Suddenly what had been known to several generations of mathematicians as the Four-Color Conjecture had become the Four-Color Theorem.Since it had been a conjecture for over one hundred years that all maps are four-colorable, and since a great deal of mathematics was done in attempts to solve the Four-Color Conjecture, it will be called a conjecture rather than a theorem throughout most of this book.
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Discovery is a child’s privilege. I mean the small child, the child who is not afraid to be wrong, to look silly, to not be serious, and to act differently from everyone else. He is also not afraid that the things he is interested in are in bad taste or turn out to be different from his expectations, from what they should be, or rather he is not afraid of what they actually are. He ignores the silent and flawless consensus that is part of the air we breathe – the consensus of all the people who are, or are reputed to be, reasonable.
Grothendieck, Récoltes et Semailles (“Crops and Seeds”).
