The Four Colour Theorem: The first time machines mogged mathematicians

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Mathematicians - who pride themselves on rationality - were suddenly confronted with a mathematical moloch in what must have felt like irreligious heresy. “God wouldn’t let the theorem be proved by a method as terrible as that! ” - Herbert Wilf, University of PennsylvaniaSome protested a mathematical proof without mathematical reasoning and were vocal about it:“the present proof relies in effect on an Oracle, and I say down with Oracles!

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