In mathematics, the exterior algebra or Grassmann algebra of a vector space
is an associative algebra that contains
which has a product, called exterior product or wedge product and denoted with
, such that
for every vector
in
The exterior algebra is named after Hermann Grassmann, and the names of the product come from the "wedge" symbol
and the fact that the product of two elements of
is "outside"
The wedge product of
vectors
is called a blade of degree
or
-blade. The wedge product was introduced originally as an algebraic construction used in geometry to study areas, volumes, and their higher-dimensional analogues: the magnitude of a 2-blade
is the area of the parallelogram defined by
and
and, more generally, the magnitude of a
-blade is the (hyper)volume of the parallelotope defined by the constituent vectors. Its bilinearity, expected from such a generalization of volume, and its alternating property that
implies a skew-symmetric property that
and more generally any blade flips sign whenever two of its constituent vectors are exchanged, corresponding to a parallelotope of opposite orientation.
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