We transpose an idea of 't Hooft from its context of Yang and Mills' theory
of strongly interacting quarks to that of strongly correlated electrons in
transition metal oxides and show that a Hubbard model of N interacting electron
species reduces, to leading orders in N, to a sum of almost planar diagrams.
The resulting generating functional and integral equations are very similar to
those of the FLEX approximation of Bickers and Scalapino. This adds the Hubbard
model at large N to the list of solvable models of strongly correlated
electrons.
PACS Numbers: 71.27.+a 71.10.-w 71.10.FdComment: revtex, 5 pages, with 3 eps figure