Serving to determine; determinative.n. That which determines, fixes, defines, or establishes something.n. In old universities, one who, having taken the lowest degree in arts, had been admitted to act as chief respondent in the Lenten disputations.n. In mathematics, the sum of all the products which can be formed of a square block of quantities, each product containing as a factor one number from each row and one from each column of the block, and each product being affected by the plus or minus sign according as the arrangement of rows from which its factors are taken (these factors being arranged in the order of the columns from which they are taken) requires an even or an odd number of transpositions to reduce it to the arrangement in the square. n. of the r order, a function of r constituents, analogous to an ordinary determinant.n. In biology, in Weismann's doctrine of germ-plasm, the material bearer of all the hereditary qualities of a cell, regarded as composed of as many biophores, or bearers of single hereditary qualities, as are to be possessed by the cell and its descendants.