How to check if m n-sized vectors are linearly independent?

Question

Disclaimer
This is not strictly a programming question, but most programmers soon or later have to deal with math (especially algebra), so I think tha

Answer 1

If computing power is not a problem, probably the best way is to find singular values of the matrix. Basically you need to find eigenvalues of M'*M and look at the ratio of the largest to the smallest. If the ratio is not very big, the vectors are independent.