In mathematics, the determinant method is any of a family of techniques in analytic number theory.
The name was coined by Roger Heath-Brown and comes from the fact that the center piece of the method is estimating a certain determinant. Its main application is to give an upper bound for the number of rational points of bounded height on or near algebraic varieties defined over the rational numbers. The main novelty of the determinant method is that in all incarnations, the estimates obtained are uniform with respect to the coefficients of the polynomials defining the variety and only depend on the degree and dimension of the variety.