In mathematics, anticommutativity is a specific property of some non-commutative mathematical operations. Swapping the position of two arguments of an antisymmetric operation yields a result which is the inverse of the result with unswapped arguments. The notion inverse refers to a group structure on the operation's codomain, possibly with another operation. Subtraction is an anticommutative operation because commuting the operands of a − b gives b − a = −(a − b); for example, 2 − 10 = −(10 − 2) = −8. Another prominent example of an anticommutative operation is the Lie bracket.
In mathematical physics, where symmetry is of central importance, or even just in multilinear algebra these operations are mostly (multilinear with respect to some vector structures and then) called antisymmetric operations, and when they are not already of arity greater than two, extended in an associative setting to cover more than two arguments.