four-color

[ fawr-kuhl-er, fohr- ]

adjective

, Printing.

1. noting or pertaining to a process for reproducing colored illustrations in a close approximation to their original hues by photographing the artwork successively through magenta, cyan, and yellow color-absorbing filters to produce four plates that are printed successively with yellow, red, blue, and black inks.

Example Sentences

In 1976, after years of fine-tuning and over a thousand hours of computer time, their algorithm finished exhaustively checking every case and the four-color theorem was established.

From Scientific American

The New York Times even refused to report on the announcement at first because proofs of the four-color theorem “were all false anyway.”

From Scientific American

The four-color theorem is now widely accepted as a fact, but still a yearning lingers over it.

From Scientific American

Francis Guthrie first conjectured the four-color theorem in 1852 when he noticed that the counties of England only needed four colors to properly fill.

From Scientific American

Eleven years after the publication of the first proof, both proofs were overturned and the slippery four-color theorem reverted its status back to the four-color conjecture.

From Scientific American