TITLE: Is Wolfram Alpha linear independence wrong or am I missing something?
QUESTION [12 upvotes]: Maybe it's because you can't ask those questions to wolfram & I should use a matrix instead but when imputting

linear independence {$t$, $t^2+1$, $t^2+1-t$}

It says the three functions are linearly independent when the third one is clearly a linear combination of the other two. How should I input this to get a valid answer? I wanna check whether or not my results are correct.

REPLY [9 votes]: Another way to check for linear independence in W|A is to compute the Wronskian, say with the input "wronskian(($t$, $t^2+1$, $t^2+1-t$), $t$)", which results in $0$ so the set of functions is indeed linearly dependent.