In mathematics, anticommutativity is a specific property of some non-commutative mathematical operations. Swapping the position of two arguments of an antisymmetric operation yields a result which is the inverse of the result with unswapped arguments. The notion inverse refers to a group structure on the operation's codomain, possibly with another operation. Subtraction is an anticommutative operation because commuting the operands of gives ; for example, . Another prominent example of an anticommutative operation is the Lie bracket.

In mathematical physics, where symmetry is of central importance, or even just in multilinear algebra these operations are mostly (multilinear with respect to some vector structures and then) called antisymmetric operations, and when they are not already of arity greater than two, extended in an associative setting to cover more than two arguments.

Definition If are two abelian groups, a bilinear map is anticommutative if for all we have

More generally, a multilinear map is anticommutative if for all we have

where is the sign of the permutation .

Properties If the abelian group has no 2-torsion, implying that if then , then any anticommutative bilinear map satisfies

More generally, by transposing two elements, any anticommutative multilinear map satisfies

if any of the are equal; such a map is said to be alternating. Conversely, using multilinearity, any alternating map is anticommutative. In the binary case this works as follows: if is alternating then by bilinearity we have

and the proof in the multilinear case is the same but in only two of the inputs.

If then Marcel Riesz (1958) Clifford Numbers and Spinors, pages 5 & 6, University of Maryland via Internet Archive

Examples

Examples of anticommutative binary operations include:

Cross product Lie bracket of a Lie algebra Lie bracket of a Lie ring Subtraction Products of i, j, and k in quaternions

See also Commutativity Commutator Exterior algebra Graded-commutative ring Operation (mathematics) Symmetry in mathematics Particle statistics (for anticommutativity in physics).

References

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External links

. Which references the Original Russian work