The absolute value of the determinant is the volume of the parallelepiped formed by the row vectors — giving beautiful coordinate formulas for areas without square roots or angles.
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as the volume of a box
State that the rows of are the box edges, then run volume through the three defining properties, covering the unit cube, orthogonal with , row exchange, and row linearity.
Parallelogram and triangle areas from coordinates
Write the area of the parallelogram with edges and from the origin as , and halve it for the triangle on the same two edges.
Triangle with three arbitrary vertices
Write the area as times the determinant whose rows are , then subtract the third row from the first two to land back on the origin case.