Original Question
Hilbert's original question was more complicated: given any two tetrahedra T1 and T2 with equal base area and equal height (and therefore equal volume), is it always possible to find a finite number of tetrahedra, so that when these tetrahedra are glued in some way to T1 and also glued to T2, the resulting polyhedra are scissors-congruent?
Dehn's invariant can be used to yield a negative answer also to this stronger question.
Read more about this topic: Hilbert's Third Problem
Famous quotes containing the words original and/or question:
“If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing. It would take us as long to recall a space of time as it took the original time to elapse, and we should never get ahead with our thinking. All recollected times undergo, accordingly, what M. Ribot calls foreshortening; and this foreshortening is due to the omission of an enormous number of facts which filled them.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“One cannot come back too often to the question what is knowledge and to the answer knowledge is what one knows.... Knowledge is the thing you know and how can you know more than you do know.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)