Speaker:  Martha Yip, University of Kentucky

Title: The volume of the caracol polytope

Abstract: A number of flow polytopes have volumes that are products of nice combinatorial quantities, but perhaps surprisingly, there are no known combinatorial proofs of these formulas.  In this talk, I will give a combinatorial interpretation of the Lidskii volume formula of Baldoni and Vergne, and use this to prove that the volume of the caracol polytope is the product of a Catalan number and the number of parking functions of length n.  This is joint work with Benedetti, Gonzalez D'Leon, Hanusa, Harris, Khare and Morales.