Product formulas for volumes of flow polytopes

Series
Combinatorics Seminar
Time
Friday, April 7, 2017 - 3:55pm for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Karola Meszaros – Cornell University – karola@math.cornell.eduhttp://www.math.cornell.edu/~karola/
Organizer
Megan Bernstein
The flow polytope associated to an acyclic graph is the set of all nonnegative flows on the edges of the graph with a fixed netflow at each vertex. We will examine flow polytopes arising from permutation matrices, alternating sign matrices and Tesler matrices. Our inspiration is the Chan-Robins-Yuen polytope (a face of the polytope of doubly-stochastic matrices), whose volume is equal to the product of the first n Catalan numbers (although there is no known combinatorial proof of this fact!). The volumes of the polytopes we study all have nice product formulas.