We study the empire colouring problem (as defined by Percy Heawood in 1890) for maps whose dual planar graph is a tree, with empires formed by exactly r countries. We prove that, for each fixed r > 1, with probability approaching one as the size of the graph grows to infinity, the minimum number of colours for which a feasible solution exists takes one of seven possible values.
Colin Cooper, Andrew R. A. McGrae, Michele Zito