Possible bug in determinant calculation

[stevengj]

@scheinerman

I’d like to make a request that det returns a number that has the same type as the entries in the matrix. So if the matrix is populated by Int s then the determinant should also be an Int .

You can do this without overflowing by using Rational{BigInt}, although this can get expensive quickly. I don’t think it should use BigInt unless you explicitly request this.

There are specialized algorithms for integer determinants (e.g. Dodgeson condensation), but in general doing computational number theory efficiently is probably outside the scope of the standard LinearAlgebra library and is more something for packages like Nemo.jl.