A little work with the Euler characteristic of surfaces such as these will show that the existence of 4 comers is virtually forced. Indeed, for any choice of edge identifications, the squares of the chessboard form a cell decomposition of the resulting surface S. For each integer i :::: 1, let n; denote the number of zero-cells (that is, points) that are
adjacent to i two-cells (squares). Then there are Li> l n; zero-cells, L; &n; one-cells,
and L; n; two-cells and the Euler characteristic [48] is