The best method for calculating the determinant of a matrix depends on
many things:
* is it sparse or dense?
* is it symbolic or numeric?
* if numeric, exact numbers (rationals) or approximate numbers (floats,
bfloats)?
* if approximate, cheap arithmetic (floats) or expensive arithmetic
(bfloats)?
* etc.
There has been some discussion on this topic in the past -- perhaps you
could work on better approaches?
-s
On Mon, Dec 23, 2013 at 11:24 AM, Evgeniy Maevskiy <emaevskiy at e-math.ru>wrote:
> Hello to all!
>
> Is it true, that "determinant(M) computes the determinant of M by a method
> similar to Gaussian elimination" ?
>
> I've try:
> -------------------------------
> A:genmatrix(lambda([i,j],random(20)),15,15)$
>
> triangularize(A)$
> -------------------------------
> - evaluation took 0.0800 seconds (0.0800 elapsed)
>
> -------------------------------
> determinant(A);
> -------------------------------
> - evaluation took 11.3000 seconds (11.3000 elapsed)
>
> This is very strange, isn't it?
>
> Evgeniy
>
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