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", 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.