 Characterization of linear surface-area isometries

For a real three-dimensional linear map $A$, preservation of every surface area is equivalent to being an orthogonal matrix. For necessity, diagonalize the symmetric matrix $A^{T}A$ in an orthonormal basis, with nonnegative eigenvalues ${\lambda }_i$. The three unit coordinate parallelograms have image areas $\sqrt{{\lambda }_1{\lambda }_2}$, $\sqrt{{\lambda }_1{\lambda }_3}$, and $\sqrt{{\lambda }_2{\lambda }_3}$. Setting all three equal to $1$ forces every ${\lambda }_i=1$. Sufficiency follows from preservation of dot products and $\Vert \mathbf{u}\times \mathbf{v}{\Vert }^2=\Vert \mathbf{u}{\Vert }^2\Vert \mathbf{v}{\Vert }^2-(\mathbf{u}\cdot \mathbf{v}{)}^2$. This specifically uses dimension three; in dimension two, preservation of planar area alone only requires $|\det A|=1$.