Antisymmetric

Antisymmetric

The word antisymmetric refers to a change to an opposite quantity when another quantity is symmetrically changed. This concept is related to that of Symmetry and Asymmetry. The difference between these three concepts can be simply illustrated with Latin letters. The character "A" is symmetric about the vertical axis while the character "B" is not. The character "S" is antisymmetric about the vertical axis since the left side is flipped relative to the right. A character such as "H" fits the definition of both symmetric and antisymmetric. In this case the correct term is symmetric.

Other uses of the term:

• Antisymmetry in linguistics.
• Antisymmetric relation in mathematics (also see below).
• Skew-symmetric matrix in matrix properties.
• Antisymmetric tensor in matricies and index subsets.