Simple determinant calculator

This project is a simple program that is able to read a matrix from a file and calculate its determinant. The project was part of the teaching course of the Bachelor in Mathematics course (Laurea in Matematica) at the university of Trento (IT), and follows the specification given by Roberto Zunino in its course on Computer Science (Informatica) that can be found here.

Structure

The code is composed of three files:

• Progetto.java which acts as a sort of "main method", it holds the function determinante which "ties together" all the functions listed in the Utils module.
• Utils.java holds most of the program logic, it holds functions for reading matrices from .txt files and for computing the determinant
• Test.java instead is an alternative class that automatically executes the code on a sample set of matrices (obtained from the specification website) and compares the computed determinants with their respective solution (available at the same website).

Test cases

As stated previously, the test cases (along with their solution) were retrieved on the professor's website, therefore the code runs on a very specific implementation of the problem.

Input format

The following is the input format for a matrix:

7
-1/2 1/1 1/4 -1/4 0/1 -1/5 1/2 
1/2 -1/1 1/2 -1/2 0/1 0/1 0/1 
0/1 1/5 -1/1 -1/8 -1/4 -3/5 1/1 
-5/9 1/6 0/1 1/3 -1/9 0/1 -3/5 
-1/3 -1/2 -1/1 1/2 3/2 -1/1 1/5 
-1/1 2/5 2/3 -1/3 4/5 -4/3 -2/9 
-1/3 3/8 1/3 -2/3 -1/4 -1/2 2/1 

And instead this is for the solution:

21432223/38880000

Filename format

The filename itself must respect the format matrice-XXX.txt for input matrices and det_matrice-XXX.txt for the solution determinant, both must be placed in different text files and in the respective folder (det or mat), while having XXX replaced. The test class runs 100 test cases, so in case one wishes to extend the test suite with additional cases, it would need also to modify the Test.java file accordingly.

The code is available on GitHub.