![]() It cares about the direction of the line from x to y and gives you positive or negative based on that direction. It really gives you a bit more than length because is a signed notion of length. On the real line function of two variables (x,y) given by x-y gives you a notion of length. There is a geometric side, which gives some motivation for his answer, because it isn't clear offhand why multilinear alternating functions should be important. I think Paul's answer gets the algebraic nub of the issue. There is a close connection between the space of alternating $k$-linear functions and the $k$-order wedge product of a space, so I could have very similarly developed the determinant based on the wedge product, but alternating $k$-linear functions are easier conceptually. In particular that $\det(MN) = \det(M)\det(N)$. Certain properties of determinants that are difficult to prove from the Liebnitz formula are almost trivial from this definition. This is sort of what the delta and permutation functions do.This is only one of many possible definitions of the determinant.Ī more "immediately meaningful" definition could be, for example, to define the determinant as the unique function on $\mathbb R^f \in A^n(V)$$Īll the properties of determinants, including the permutation formula can be developed from this. If you have a moderately complex function, and you replace an if-then statement with a call to a small function that has an if-then statement, you’ve reduced the overall complexity. One way of measuring the complexity of a computer program is the maximum number of logic branches in any function. There is a nice relation between the two given below. This post started out by talking about the more familiar Kronecker delta as an introduction to the permutation symbol. Determinants of larger matrices work the same way. This is also the determinant of the matrix whose rows are the vectors a, b, and c. Similarly, the triple product of vectors a, b and c is So here we’re summing over j and k, each running from 1 to 3. Here we’re using tensor notation where components are indicated by superscripts rather than subscripts, and there’s an implied summation over repeated indices. The ith component of the cross product of b × c is For two indices,Īn example use of the permutation symbol is cross products. When all indices are distinct, the permutation symbol can be computed from a product. If you do have a list of integers, you can use the * operator to unpack the list into separate arguments. Both take a variable number of integers as arguments, not a list of integers as Mathematica does. It also has Eijk as an alias for LeviCivita. SymPy has a function LeviCivita for computing the permutation symbol. You can compute permutation symbols in Mathematica with the function Signature. The symbol ε 122 is 0 because the last two indices are equal. ![]() ε 312 = 1 because you can put the indices in order with two adjacent swaps: 3 1, then 3 2. Examplesįor example, ε 213 = -1 because it takes one adjacent swap, exchanging the 2 and the 1, to put the indices in order. In other words, permutations whose permutation symbol is 1. One of the families of finite simple groups are the alternating groups, the group of even permutations on a set with at least five elements. Incidentally, I mentioned even and odd permutations a few days ago in the context of finite simple groups. Two different ways of getting from one arrangement to another may use a different number of swaps, but the number of swaps in both approaches will have the same parity.) You could change one order of indices to another by different series of swaps. (There’s an implicit theorem here saying that the definition above makes sense. You could think of putting the indices into a bubble sort algorithm and counting whether the algorithm does an even or odd number of swaps. If it takes an odd number of swaps, the sign is -1. If you can order the indices with an even number of swaps, the sign of the permutation is 1. Otherwise, the symbol evaluates to 1 or -1. If any two of the subscripts are equal, the symbol evaluates to 0. The permutation symbol, sometimes called the Levi-Civita symbol, can have any number of subscripts. This is analogous to how you might reduce the complexity of a computer program. ![]() In other words, the symbol encapsulates some complexity, keeping it out of your calculation. It has some branching logic built into its definition, which keeps branching out of your calculation, letting you handle things more uniformly. That is, you don’t have to write “if … else …” in when doing your calculation. Because branching logic is built into the symbol, it can keep branching logic outside of your calculation. One example of this is the Kronecker delta function δ ij which is defined to be 1 if i = j and zero otherwise. Sometimes simple notation can make a big difference.
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