Beaver wishes to color the squares and triangles of the following figure so that no two neighboring shapes, even though sharing a single vertex, are the same color. What is the least number of colors he needs? Note that the maximum number of figures that meet at one single vertex is 5, so we will need at least 5 colors to color the figure because 5 pieces might meet at one vertex. We can see that using just 5 colors is sufficient by cleverly using a pattern of colors.

coloring

geometric

puzzle

vertex

pattern