A Group Effort

Fifty years ago, mathematician Paul Erds posed a problem to friends at one of his regular tea parties. The trio thought they would be able to come up with a solution the same afternoon. It took 49 years for other mathematicians to provide an answer. The Erds-Faber-Lovász conjecture focused on a familiar question in mathematics, one of graph coloring. However, this was not on a conventional graph, but on another more-complex structure: a hypergraph.