Permutation/Sign via transpositions/Fact/Proof

Proof

Suppose that the transposition ${}\tau$ swaps the numbers ${}k<\ell$. Then

${}{\begin{aligned}\operatorname {sgn} (\tau )&=\prod _{i<j}{\frac {\tau (j)-\tau (i)}{j-i}}\\&=\prod _{i<j,\,i,j\neq k,\ell }{\frac {\tau (j)-\tau (i)}{j-i}}\cdot \prod _{i<j,\,i=k,j\neq \ell }{\frac {\tau (j)-\tau (i)}{j-i}}\cdot \prod _{i<j,\,i\neq k,j=\ell }{\frac {\tau (j)-\tau (i)}{j-i}}\cdot \prod _{i<j,\,i=k,j=\ell }{\frac {\tau (j)-\tau (i)}{j-i}}\\&=\prod _{j>k,\,j\neq \ell }{\frac {j-\ell }{j-k}}\cdot \prod _{i\neq k,\,i<\ell }{\frac {k-i}{\ell -i}}\cdot {\frac {k-\ell }{\ell -k}}\\&=\prod _{j>\ell }{\frac {j-\ell }{j-k}}\cdot \prod _{i<k}{\frac {k-i}{\ell -i}}\cdot \prod _{k<j<\ell }{\frac {j-\ell }{j-k}}\cdot \prod _{k<i<\ell }{\frac {k-i}{\ell -i}}\cdot (-1)\\&=-1.\end{aligned}}$

The last equation follows from the fact that, in the first and the second product, all numerators and denominators are positive, and the fact that, in the third and in the forth product, the numerators are negative and the denominators are positive. Therefore, as the index sets of the third and the fourth product coincide, all the signs cancel each other.

The statement follows from the case of a transposition via the homomorphism property.

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