How Lewis Carroll computed determinants

Not trying to cheapen anything about this article, but I'm very sure this is how I was taught to calculate them in several schools. Have any of you been taught otherwise?

That is a nice method to compute determinants of matrices. I wish they taught this method when I was in high school.<p>As John D Cook points out, the fact that the core 2x2 matmul operations that can be done in parallel is a big benefit for doing this in software or hardware.

Does anyone have a geometrical intuition about how this works? Maybe just for 3d case? How does condensation compute the volume of a parallelepiped from the individual areas of parallelogram? And what does the division do?

TIL Lewis Caroll was also a mathematician.

I like the cofactors method as it helps me track signs by relating i to the column and row positions

I don&#x27;t see how this is cheaper by efficient mechanical computation or cognitively easier for humans than Laplace expansion. Also, we were taught to use decomposition to grab eigenvectors and the det. It was pretty easy to verify correctness because of my handy HP 48G had an RPN CAS and a &quot;spreadsheet&quot; matrix editor.