Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. The Levi-Civita symbol, also called the permutation symbol, antisymmetric symbol, or alternating symbol, is a mathematical symbol used in particular in tensor calculus. It is named after the Italian mathematician and physicist Tullio Levi-Civita.The tensor whose components in an orthonormal basis are given by the Levi-Civita symbol (a tensor of covariant rank n) is sometimes called the permutation tensor. It is actually a pseudotensor because under an orthogonal transformation of jacobian determinant 1 (i.e., a rotation composed with a reflection), it acquires a minus sign. Because the Levi-Civita symbol is a pseudotensor, the result of taking a cross product is a pseudovector, not a vector.