The mapping has the property
-
where is the -th entry of the -th column vector . Therefore,
-
This is if and only if
for all , and this is equivalent with
-
For this vector equation, there exists a nontrivial tuple , if and only if the columns are linearly dependent, and this holds if and only if the
kernel
of is not trivial. Due to
fact,
this is equivalent with not being injective.