Speaker:  Karola Mészáros, Cornell University
Title: Product formulas for volumes of flow polytopes
Time: 2:30 PM, Monday, Feb 6, 2017
Place:  Malott 206

Abstract: 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.


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