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Kenneth Appel (born 1932) is a mathematician who in 1976, with colleague Wolfgang Haken at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, solved one of the most famous problems in mathematics, the four-color theorem. This article is about the flagship campus For other uses and locations of University of Illinois, see University of Illinois (disambiguation The University of Mathematics is the body of Knowledge and Academic discipline that studies such concepts as Quantity, Structure, Space and The four color theorem (also known as the four color map theorem) states that given any plane separated into regions such as a political map of the states of a country They proved that any two-dimensional map, with certain limitations, can be filled in with four colors without any adjacent "countries" sharing the same color. Appel's children, including Laurel Appel, Peter Appel, and Andrew Appel, now a professor at Princeton, helped in the checking of over 1000 topological cases that constitute this proof. Andrew Wilson Appel is a professor of Computer science at Princeton University, New Jersey.

The proof has been one of the most controversial of modern mathematics because of its heavy dependence on computer "number-crunching" to sort through possibilities. Even Appel has agreed, in numerous interviews, that it lacks elegance and provided no new insight that has guided future mathematical research.

Others, however, have pointed to this work as the start of a sea-change in mathematicians' attitudes toward computers - which they had largely disdained as a tool for engineers rather than for theoreticians - leading to the creation of what is sometimes called "experimental mathematics. "

From 1993 through 2002, Appel was head of the mathematics department at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, New Hampshire. University of New Hampshire ( UNH) is a public university in the University System of New Hampshire (USNH United States. Durham is a town in Strafford County, New Hampshire, United States. Although retired now, he still works and occasionally teaches there and has an office on campus (in the new Kingsbury Hall. )


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