SCISSORS CONGRUENCES, GROUP HOMOLOGY AND CHARACTERISTIC CLASSES (Nankai Tracts in Mathematics) - Hardcover

DuPont, Johan L

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 9810245076 ISBN 13: 9789810245078

Publisher: World Scientific Publishing Company, 2001

Synopsis

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: World Scientific Publishing Company
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 9810245076
• ISBN 13: 9789810245078
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 176
• Editor: Zhang Weiping