Scissors Congruences, Group Homology and Characteristic Classes (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9789810245085)

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", i.e. 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, characteristic 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.

Author: Johan L. DuPont
ISBN-10: 9810245084
ISBN-13: 9789810245085
Publisher: World Scientific Publishing Company
Language: English
Published: 03/01/2001
Pages: 176
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.54lbs
Size: 8.48h x 6.02w x 0.38d