Time for action – calculating the determinant of a matrix

To calculate the determinant of a matrix, follow these steps:

1. Create the matrix:

   A = np.mat("3 4;5 6")
   print("A\n", A)

   The matrix we created appears as follows:

   A
   [[ 3.  4.]
    [ 5.  6.]]
   

2. Compute the determinant with the det() function:

   print("Determinant", np.linalg.det(A))

   The determinant appears as follows:

   Determinant -2.0
   

What just happened?

We calculated the determinant of a matrix with the det() function from the numpy.linalg module (see determinant.py):

from __future__ import print_function
import numpy as np

A = np.mat("3 4;5 6")
print("A\n", A)

print("Determinant", np.linalg.det(A))