• 1 Department of Mathematics [Cornell]
• 2 University of California [Los Angeles]
• 3 Department of Mathematics [Univ California San Diego]

We introduce the Tesler polytope $Tes_n(a)$, whose integer points are the Tesler matrices of size n with hook sums $a_1,a_2,...,a_n in Z_{\geq 0}$. We show that $Tes_n(a)$ is a flow polytope and therefore the number of Tesler matrices is counted by the type $A_n$ Kostant partition function evaluated at $(a_1,a_2,...,a_n,-\sum_{i=1}^n a_i)$. We describe the faces of this polytope in terms of "Tesler tableaux" and characterize when the polytope is simple. We prove that the h-vector of $Tes_n(a)$ when all $a_i>0$ is given by the Mahonian numbers and calculate the volume of $Tes_n(1,1,...,1)$ to be a product of consecutive Catalan numbers multiplied by the number of standard Young tableaux of staircase shape.