Statement:

How many colors are needed to paint \(\mathbb{R}^3 \) so that no two points a unit distance apart are painted the same color?

-Equivalently-

What is the chromatic number \(\chi \left(\mathbb{E}^3 \right) \) of the infinite unit-distance graph G, with every point in the plane a vertex, and an edge between two vertices if they are separated by a unit distance.

Author	Date Published
Hadwider and Edward Nelson	1944

Partial Results:

The chromatic number of \(\mathbb{R}^3 \) is bounded by \(6\leq \chi \left(\mathbb{E}^3 \right)\leq15 \)

Related Problems:

Q908003 Chromatic Number of \(\mathbb{R}^2 \)
Q908005 Chromatic Number of \(\mathbb{R}^n \)
Monochromatic Triangles

References:

[1] P. Erdős and N. G. de Bruijn. A colour problem for infinite graphs and a problem in the theory of relations. Indag. Math., 13:371–373, 1951.

[2] R. L. Graham. Open problems in Euclidean Ramsey theory. Geocombinatorics, XIII(4):165–177, April 2004.

[3] R. L. Graham. Euclidean Ramsey theory. In Jacob E. Goodman and Joseph O’Rourke, editors, Handbook of Discrete and Computational Geometry, chapter 11, pages 239–254. CRC Press LLC, Boca Raton, FL, 2nd edition, 2004.

[4] Joseph O’Rourke. Computational geometry column 46. Internat. J. Comput. Geom. Appl., 14(6):475–478, 2004. Also in SIGACT News, 35(3):42–45 (2004), Issue 132.

[5] M. S. Payne. Unit distance graphs with ambiguous chromatic number. arXiv:0707.1177v2 [math.CO], 2009.

[6] The Open Problems Project, Erik D. Demaine, Joseph S. B. Mitchell, Joseph O’Rourke https://topp.openproblem.net/

Keywords:

Combinatorial Geometry; chromatic number; unit-distance graph