Problem Statement
What is the chromatic number of the plane? That is, what is the smallest number of colours required to colour $\mathbb{R}^2$ such that no two points of the same colour are distance $1$ apart?
Categories:
Geometry Ramsey Theory
Progress
The Hadwiger-Nelson problem. Let $\chi$ be the chromatic number of the plane. An equilateral triangle trivially shows that $\chi\geq 3$. There are several small graphs that show $\chi\geq 4$ (in particular the Moser spindle and Golomb graph). The best bounds currently known are\[5 \leq \chi \leq 7.\]The lower bound is due to de Grey [dG18]. The upper bound can be seen by colouring the plane by tesselating by hexagons with diameter slightly less than $1$.See also [704], [705], and [706]. The independence number of a finite unit distance graph is the topic of [1070].
Source: erdosproblems.com/508 | Last verified: January 15, 2026