> I believe I could walk up to any college senior in physics and they wouldn't know that “the determinant is the product of the eigenvalues," Unless things hav

> I believe I could walk up to any college senior in physics and they wouldn't know that “the determinant is the product of the eigenvalues," Unless things have gotten significantly worse in physics education in the past decade, I'd be happy to take the other side of that bet. I will also be willing to bet they could prove it. The problem you'd have with physicists is convincing them that there are matrices that aren't diagonalizable.