Wednesday, January 2, 2019

Appendix on Determinants

Determinator Comic:
from Courtney Gibbon's
 
Brown Sharpie (CC: BY-NC-NA)
In our original 1980's text, we had an 11 page appendix on determinants.  That was probably overkill since our inclusion of matrix diagonalization isn't really mainstream discrete math, but back then the exact content of a discrete math course wasn't so well defined.   When I revived Applied Discrete Structures, I never got around to converting the determinant appendix.  We still have diagonalization in chapter 12 and for completeness I've put together a more compact appendix.  Right now, a draft is available as a pdf at http://discretemath.org.  


I haven't decided whether to integrate it into the text or just leave it as a supplement. I'm concerned that the full print version is getting a bit unwieldy.  I'm hoping to find a way to automatically exclude it from the print version but include it in the web version, where length isn't an issue.