Scissors Congruences, Group Homology And Characteristic Classes

These lecture notes are based on a series of lectures given at the Nankai Institute of Mathematics in the fall of 1998. They provide an overview of the work of the author and the late Chih-Han Sah on various aspects of Hilbert’s Third Problem: Are two Euclidean polyhedra with the same volume scissors-congruent , ie. can they be subdivided into finitely many pairwise congruent pieces? The book starts from the classical solution of this problem by M. Dehn. But generalization to higher dimensions and other geometries quickly leads to a great variety of mathematical topics, such as homology of groups, algebraic K-theory, characteristics classes for flat bundles, and invariants for hyperbolic manifolds. Some of the material, particularly in the chapters on projective configurations, is published here for the first time.