Discrete Geometry and Combinatorics Seminar

Karola MészárosCornell University
Product formulas for volumes of flow polytopes

Monday, February 6, 2017 - 2:30pm
Malott 206

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.