How to calculate the rank of a matrix?

The second column - first column is the last column so the rank is $<3$.

The first two colums are linearly independent so the rank is $2$.


Simply use row reduction: the rank is the number of non-zero rows after you've performed row reduction: \begin{align} &\begin{bmatrix} 3&2&-1\\2&-3&-5\\-1&-4&-3 \end{bmatrix}\rightsquigarrow \begin{bmatrix} 1&4&3\\3&2&-1\\2&-3&-5 \end{bmatrix}\rightsquigarrow \begin{bmatrix} 1&4&3\\0&-10&-10\\0&-11&-11 \end{bmatrix}\\[1ex] \rightsquigarrow&\begin{bmatrix} 1&4&3\\0&1&1\\0&-11&-11 \end{bmatrix}\rightsquigarrow \begin{bmatrix} 1&4&3\\0&1&1\\0&0&0 \end{bmatrix} \end{align} Thus, the rank is $2$.

Note that it was obvious after the second step.


The key word is row echelon form.