Let
be the field of real numbers
or the field of complex numbers
. Given a vector
. The directional derivative operator with respect to the vector
, denoted by
, is a map from the ring
to itself, defined by

where
is the formal partial derivative of the polynomial
with respect to the variable
.
Theorem 1. Let
, constants
, and a linear form
. The operator
has the following properties.
(1)
.
(2)
.
(3) For any positive integer
,
.
(4)
.
Proof. (1) By the definition of the partial derivative of a polynomial, we have

thus we immediately obtain 
(2) Since the formal partial derivative obeys the product rule
we have


(3) We prove this by mathematical induction on
.
For
, the formula becomes
, which is trivially true.
Suppose the property holds for
, that is

Applying (2), we obtain


By the principle of mathematical induction, the property holds for all positive integers
.
(4) For a linear form
, we have

The theorem is completely proved. 
Theorem 2 (Brill). Suppose
is the field of real numbers
or the field of complex numbers
. Let
be
non-zero linear forms in
variables that are pairwise non-proportional over
. Then, for any integer
, the set of powers
is linearly independent over
.
Proof. We prove the theorem by mathematical induction on the number of linear forms
. For
, we have 1 non-zero linear form
. For any integer
, the polynomial
is not the zero polynomial, so the set consisting of only one element
is trivially linearly independent. Thus, the assertion holds for
.
Now suppose the assertion holds for
linear forms, for some integer
. Consider
non-zero pairwise non-proportional linear forms
and an exponent
.
Consider the linear relation
(1)
where
. We need to show that
for all
.
Since
is not identically
, the set of points
such that
is an
-dimensional vector subspace of the space
. At the same time, since
is not proportional to
for all
, the intersection of the two spaces
and
is an
-dimensional subspace.
The field
has characteristic
and is therefore an infinite field. A vector space over an infinite field cannot be the union of finitely many proper subspaces (see [1]). Therefore, there exists a vector
such that
and 
Consider the directional derivative operator with respect to the vector
defined as follows

When applying
to a linear form 
we have 
When applying this operator to the
-th power of
, we obtain

Applying the operator
to both sides of equation (1), we have
Since
, the
-th term vanishes completely. Since
, we have
, so we can divide both sides by
(which is valid since
has characteristic
) to obtain

Since
, we deduce that
. Applying the inductive hypothesis to
linear forms with the exponent
, the set of polynomials
is linearly independent. Therefore, all coefficients in the sum above must be zero. That is,
But by the choice of the vector
, we already have
, so we must have
Substituting
back into (1), we have
. Since
is not zero,
.
Thus
, and
is linearly independent. By the principle of mathematical induction, the theorem is proved. 
References
[1] https://nttuan.org/2010/02/04/finite-unions-of-proper-subspaces-over-an-infinite-field/