Hook Formulas for Skew Shapes II. Combinatorial Proofs and Enumerative Applications

The Naruse hook-length formula is a recent general formula for the number of standard Young tableaux of skew shapes, given as a positive sum over excited diagrams of products of hook-lengths. In [MPP1] we gave two different q-analogues of Naruse’s formula: for the skew Schur functions, and for counting reverse plane partitions of skew shapes. In this paper we give an elementary proof of Naruse’s formula based on the case of border strips. For special border strips, we obtain curious new formulas for the Euler and q-Euler numbers in terms of certain Dyck path summations.