Determinant of Large Matrix

[J. Robertson]

James Stroud wrote:
> Hello All,
> 
> I'm using numpy to calculate determinants of matrices that look like 
> this (13x13):
> 
> [[ 0.  1.  1.  1.  1.  1.  1.  1.  1.  1.  1.  1.  1.  1.]
[snip]
> But I have a feeling I'm exceeding the capacity of floats here. Does 
> anyone have an idea for how to treat this? Is it absurd to think I could 
> get a determinant of this matrix? Is there a python package that could 
> help me?
> 
> Many thanks for any answers.
> 
> James

in order to verify that this result is correct, you could get the 
eigenvector and eigenvalues of this matrix (for example with 
numpy.linalg.eig) and check that they make sense; the determinant simply 
is the product of all the eigenvalues.

gd luck