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Daniel Litt
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Geometric Proof of the Vandermonde Determinant?

The Vandermonde matrix is the $n\times n$ matrix whose $(i,j)$-th component is $x_j^{i-1}$, where the $x_j$ are indeterminates. It is well known that the determinant of this matrix is $$\prod_{1\leq i < j \leq n} (x_i-x_j).$$

There are many known proofs of this fact, using for example row reduction or the Laplace expansion (here), and a combinatorial proof by Art Benjamin and Gregory Dresden (here). An easy proof follows by noting that the variety of the determinant contains (as a set) the variety of $x_i-x_j$ for all $i < j$ and then by computing the degree of the determinant as a polynomial in the $x_i, x_j$, though I don't know a reference for this proof.

Given that this result is amenable to such a wide variety of proofs (the above list contains three somewhat different flavors of proof---linear algebraic, combinatorial, and algebra-geometric), I have the following question:

Does anyone know a geometric proof of this result?

For example, one might compute the volume of the parallelepiped whose vertices are given by the rows or columns of this matrix in a clever way. Ideally this would not just boil down to row reduction.

Daniel Litt
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