Of course. Theoretically, the determinant answers the binary question "singular" or "nonsingular". Numerically, such a binary answer is pretty useless. Here, w

Of course. Theoretically, the determinant answers the binary question "singular" or "nonsingular". Numerically, such a binary answer is pretty useless. Here, we need a measure of how singular/nonsingular a matrix is relative to the numerical precision we are working with.