Is the length of the multilinear cross product given by this formula? If not, what is the correct formula?

147 Views Asked by At

This is an attempt to make this question more specific.

We can compute the length of the cross product in $\mathbb{R}^3$ using the formula: $$|x\times y| = \sqrt{|x|^2|y|^2 - |x\cdot y|^2}$$

This makes sense for $x,y \in \mathbb{R}^3$ and has a geometric meaning; it's the area of the parallelogram spanned by $x$ and $y$.

There's also a higher-dimensional version. For example, if $x,y,z \in \mathbb{R}^4$, there's a natural way of getting an orthogonal vector, that we might as well denote $x \times y \times z$. It should be understood that the function $\Box \times \Box \times \Box$ is a ternary operator, and cannot be refactored as $(\Box \times \Box) \times \Box$ or anything like that.

Anyway, I'd like to know if there's a similar formula for higher-dimensional cross products, perhaps of the form $$|x \times y \times z| = \sqrt{\mathrm{something}}$$

It seems reasonable to conjecture that this is the square root of the determinant of the corresponding Gramian matrix. In particular, it seems reasonable to expect that $$|x \times y \times z| = \sqrt{\det([x,y,z]^\top [x,y,z])}$$

I'm tempted to write this as an answer to the question linked at the beginning of this question, but I'm not 100% sure it's true.

Question. Is the length of the multilinear cross product of $x_1,\ldots,x_n \in \mathbb{R}^{n+1}$ given by $$|x_1 \times \cdots \times x_n| = \sqrt{\det([x_1,\ldots,x_n]^\top [x_1,\ldots,x_n])}\ ?$$

If so, how do we prove this?

If not, what is the correct formula?

1

There are 1 best solutions below

3
On BEST ANSWER

I show the proof for $n=3,$ it can easily be extended to any $n\in\mathbb{N}.$

Let $u=x\times y\times z$ and $A=\begin{pmatrix} & & & \\ u & x & y & z \\ & & & \end{pmatrix} \in \mathbb{R}^{4\times 4}.$ Applying Cramer's Rule, we find $$ A^T\cdot u = \begin{pmatrix} 1 \\ 0 \\ 0 \\ 0 \end{pmatrix} \cdot \det(A) $$ On the other hand, we have $u=A\cdot \begin{pmatrix} 1 \\ 0 \\ 0 \\ 0\end{pmatrix}.$ Therefore, $$ A^TA\cdot \begin{pmatrix} 1 \\ 0 \\ 0 \\ 0 \end{pmatrix} = \begin{pmatrix} 1 \\ 0 \\ 0 \\ 0\end{pmatrix}\cdot \det(A) $$ Note that $$A^TA = \begin{pmatrix} u^Tu & 0 \\ 0 & \left[x,y,z\right]^T\left[x,y,z\right] \end{pmatrix} $$ Therefore, we get $$ u^Tu = \det(A) = \sqrt{\det(A^T)\det(A)} = \sqrt{\det(A^TA)} =\sqrt{u^T u \cdot \det(\left[x,y,z\right]^T\left[x,y,z\right])} $$ Now we can divide by $\sqrt{u^Tu}$ on both sides and get the desired result.