determinant

A determining factor; an element that determines the nature of something.

1999, Noah P. Barsky, Stuart Bruchey (editor), Organizational Determinants of Budgetary Influence and Involvement, Taylor & Francis (Garland Publishing), page 4, Shields and Young (1993) argue that the budget participation literature "has not produced a coherent nor unified definition" of both the determinants and consequences of budget participation.

The field of the social determinants of health is perhaps the most complex and challenging of all.

A scalar that encodes certain characteristics of a given transformation matrix; the unique scalar function over square matrices which is distributive over matrix multiplication, multilinear in the rows and columns, and takes the value 1 for

1966 [Allyn & Bacon], Howard Whitley Eves, Elementary Matrix Theory, 1980, Dover, Unabridged corrected republication, page 165, The determinant of a square matrix A_(n) is a function (actually a polynomial function) of the elements a_ij of A.

1990, Assem S. Deif, Advanced Matrix Theory for Scientists and Engineers, Gordon and Breach Science Publishers (Abacus Press), 2nd Edition, page 18, Show that the determinant of a Hermitian matrix is real and that of a skew-Hermitian matrix is imaginary.

A substance that causes a cell to adopt a particular fate.

Something that causes a nuclease to cut at a specified point

Serving to determine or limit; determinative.