Post Made Community Wiki by Anton Geraschenko♦♦
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Kempe's "proof" of the four-color theorem springs to mind. Wikipedia says that Kempe published it in 1879 and it was proven to be incorrect by Heawood in 1890. As I recall, the flaw in the original argument was as follows: Kempe defined a structure on a planar graph called a Kempe chain, and argued that certain of these chains could not intersect. There was a subtle flaw in this argument (which I can't seem to find a decent explanation of) and it failed for certain large graphs - the chains can in fact intersect. Heawood provided a 25-node example of intersecting chains; the smallest counterexamples are the Fritsch and Soifer graphs on 9 nodes.

Edit: I didn't address the reknown of Kempe's proof. Wikipedia says that it was "widely acclaimed" (interesting coincidence of wording) while Thomas 1998 provides an excellent history but says little on this matter. I don't know if this could be truly considered "widely acclaimed" based on an uncited Wikipedia entry.

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Kempe's "proof" of the four-color theorem springs to mind. Wikipedia says that Kempe published it in 1879 and it was proven to be incorrect by Heawood in 1890. As I recall, the flaw in the original argument was as follows: Kempe defined a structure on a planar graph called a Kempe chain, and argued that certain of these chains could not intersect. There was a subtle flaw in this argument (which I can't seem to find a decent explanation of) and it failed for certain large graphs - the chains can in fact intersect. Heawood provided a 25-node example of intersecting chains; the smallest counterexamples are the Fritsch and Soifer graphs on 9 nodes.