I am just starting to explore STACK (https://stack-assessment.org/) which is based on Maxima, to develop math questions that can be automatically evaluated. I was working on a linear transformation problem that asks for the kernel of $T: \mathbb{R}^4 \rightarrow \mathbb{R}^3: (x_1, x_2, x_3, x_4) \mapsto(2x_1+4x_2+6x_3+5x_4, -x_1-2x_2+2x_3, 8x_3+4x_4)$. The manually calculated solution I found is $\textrm{ker}(T) = \textrm{span}\{(-2,1,0,0), (-1,0,-\frac{1}{2},1)\}$. It is also confirmed with several online nullspace calculators I tried.
However, when I tried to use Maxima (5.41 and 5.46) with the following code:
(%i1) A: matrix([2,4,6,5],[-1,-2,2,0],[0,0,8,4]);
(%o1) matrix(
[2, 4, 6, 5],
[-1, -2, 2, 0],
[0, 0, 8, 4]
)
(%i2) nullspace(A);
0 errors, 0 warnings
(%o2) span(matrix(
[-20],
[10],
[0],
[0]
),matrix(
[0],
[10],
[10],
[-20]
))
While I tried it on Mathematica
A = {{2,4,6,5},{-1,-2,2,0},{0,0,8,4}}
NullSpace[A]
{{-2,0,-1,2},{-2,1,0,0}}
Did I miss something on my Maxima code so it returned a different span set? Can Maxima evaluate whether a vector belongs to a span set?