SUMS: Wong -- Scissors Congruence

Speaker: Sampson Wong (University of Sydney undergraduate) 

Abstract: Given two polygons, how do we check if the two have the same area? A cool way
to do so is to cut one polygon into a bunch of small pieces, and rearrange these pieces
to make the other polygon.  This is the Ancient Greek’s notion of "equal area", but it
is not obvious that this "cut and rearrange" operation always exists between any two
polygons.  The problem of "cutting and rearranging" one polygon into another will be
examined, and a difficult 3-dimensional equivalent of this problem will be formulated
and discussed.