Matching variables to equations in infinite linear equation systems

A fundamental result in linear algebra states that if a homogenous linear equation system has only the trivial solution, then there are at most as many variables as equations. We prove the following generalisation of this phenomenon. If a possibly infinite homogenous linear equation system with finitely many variables in each equation has only the trivial solution, then there exists an injection from the variables to the equations that maps each variable to an equation in which it appears.& COPY; 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).