Seven Bridges of Königsberg
Leonhard Euler first proved the handshaking lemma in his work on the Seven Bridges of Königsberg, asking for a walking tour of the city of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad) crossing each of its seven bridges once. This can be translated into graph-theoretic terms as asking for an Euler path or Euler tour of a connected graph representing the city and its bridges: a walk through the graph that traverses each edge once, either ending at a different vertex than it starts in the case of an Euler path or returning to its starting point in the case of an Euler tour. Euler stated the fundamental results for this problem in terms of the number of odd vertices in the graph, which the handshaking lemma restricts to be an even number. If this number is zero, an Euler tour exists, and if it is two, an Euler path exists. Otherwise, the problem cannot be solved. In the case of the Seven Bridges of Königsberg, the graph representing the problem has four odd vertices, and has neither an Euler path nor an Euler tour.