Why do math textbooks leave out solutions to exercises?

Because they expect you to buy a solutions manual. Also most students are lazy and would just copy the answers.

It sucks I know.

>>8116375
>solutions manual
>just copy the answers

lol what kind of baby level book are you talking about

This drives me nuts in just about every textbook I own.

>>8116387
Same. Since I'm self-studying and want to validate my proofs are correct I have to consult the internet. Not very effective when you have to wait for someone to respond to you when the book could have outlined the general gist of it to check your work.

>>8116383 Literally any book with lots of example problems. They all do that.

Get a textbook meant for self study.

>>8116405
I haven't used a math textbook that had a solution manual since freshman year.

> I have no way of knowing 100% if I made a mistake somewhere.


God you sound like a little bitch. Why are you self-studying? You need to be more resourceful. You can't just rely on one thing to know if you're correct. Also, if you really aren't 100% sure that you're correct, you probably don't understand the material well enough, and should read the chapter again. If you don't know how to solve the problems BEFORE you get to them, then you aren't studying efficiently. Self-studying requires creativity and resourcefulness. If you need a solutions book to know if you're right, really just don't bother self-studying. Give up and take a class.

>>8116799
>you should be perfect at something before you attempt practicing it

Holy shit you are stupid anon

>Why do math textbooks leave out solutions to exercises
Sorry OP we can't tell you why. The explanation is trivial and is left as an exercise for the reader.

>>8116799
this is the dumbest fuck I've ever heard

>>8116799
ayy lmao

File: 1454526129721.png (215KB, 640x464px) Image search: [Google]

215KB, 640x464px

>>8116799

>This post

[code]
enter code here
[/code]

>>8117115
Top kek

>>8116364
Most solution manuals for textbooks are sold on Amazon and Abebooks for around $20-$35.

>>8117115
Why would you learn something you already know?

>>8116799
EDGE
D
G
E

File: 4-935.jpg (29KB, 544x286px) Image search: [Google]

29KB, 544x286px

>read chapter of engineering textbook
>time for some practice problems
>ah! problem 28 seems difficult
>spend an hour solving problem
>write MATLAB scripts and everything
>OK time to see if I did this right
>check end of chapter problems
>26
>27
>29
>mfw

They typically leave out half the answers so instructors can give graded homework.

Do you have a smart phone? Download symbolab. You can go as far as very as intermediately difficult ordinary differential equations with 2 or sometimes 3 variables.

>>8116799
This b8 m8. No one can possibly be this stupid and conceited

>>8116364
By the time you're reading a university-level math text, you should be non-retarded enough to sanity check your own work and make sure it's reasonable.
Yes, maybe 1/50 times you'll be wrong and you'll skip an exercise thinking you did it, but who cares? You don't need to remember every exercise in the book 100% perfectly, and you won't anyway.
A solutions manual with any detail in it would also bloat most books by more than 100 pages.

>buy $250 textbook
>answers to selected problems section has dozens of mistakes
Fucking asshole writer deserves to be shot.

>>8117661
It seems like the one that writes solutions are usually TAs or students and not the professor

File: 1406269342289.jpg (70KB, 708x720px) Image search: [Google]

70KB, 708x720px

>>8116364
What are you retarded OP?
If they gave you the answers everyone would just cheat on the homework. How do you expect anyone to learn if they just cheat on the homework? Try studying instead of looking for ways to cheat.

For proof based math, math.stackexchange and proofwiki are your best friends.

>>8117679
Nearly everyone where I go to school cheats anyway. A couple people actually do the problems and everyone copies their work.

>>8117679
It's for a higher level math class that isnt required to take. I'm doing it for fun and since it's in an area I could see myself going to grad school for.

>>8117694
Thanks

>>8116364
Yes, quite annoying that.

For me, there was no better revision method than looking through worked answers.

I'd basically find every worked solution for my relevant topic I could find, and make sure I was able to undertand them all completely so I could answer any question of that type.

To be honest, this didn't serve me well in university.
At A-level I did well because worked solutions were easily available which provided for the kinds of questions that would come up on an exam. For an A-level math exam, I'd maybe have 100 worked solutions to go by during the revision period. Beautiful.

At university level, I'd come across questions in the exam proper which I had never encountered before despite my hunt for worked solutions during the revision period. This meant I'd come out of some exams with practically the highest grade in the class, which was for those exams which my worked solutions revision covered; but for other exams I'd come out near bottom - those exams which the worked solutions I had done during revision did not cover.
This might be because at university I was only able to find in the range of ~20 worked solutions for the kinds of questions on some of the exam papers.


So whilst hunting out all the available worked solutions was my favourite method of revision, I cannot swear by it for the university level, unfortunately.

>>8117716
... cont:

I realise that at university level you are supposed to be able to think on your feet, and hence not rely on an overstretched memory recalling 100 different past questions, but I ain't smart enough to think on my feet like that; in fact, that's probably the thing I learnt most at university.
I remember I had all these difficult proofs in my head for the fluid mechanics exam. I understood the proofs once I had had written them out in front of me on paper, but I'd have to rely on getting it all out on the paper via memory, not via intuition.
And of course most of these proofs didn't come up in the exam. Toplel.

>>8117727
>proofs in my head for the fluid mechanics exam
>fluid mechanics
>proofs
You're supposed to understand them and move on anon, not memorize them.

>>8117727
....cont AGAIN:

In fact, I am actually rather proud of that ability to hold information.
I remember in one exam, the lecturers practically insisted that we remember some relevant formulae and spend the first 5 minutes of the exam writing down the formula on a plain piece of paper, and use it from there.

In the first 5 minutes I had packed a piece of A4 paper with dozens and dozens of formulae that I had stored in my head along with the rest of my revision info stored in their.

I doubt many people had such power of recollection as I.

>>8117733
Proofs were actually a part of the university examinations. The meatiest ones were perhaps a page long. This is 3rd year mathematics at this point.

>>8117737
huh, we never had any proofs in our fluid mech exams.

>>8117679
high schooler detected
Some of us actually want to learn and zero interest in "cheating." Wtf is cheating if you're self-learning anyway??? baka

>>8117716
As someone currently in A2, this is exactly what I've been afraid of for a while

>>8117741
Lucky you!

They were actually quite nice proofs.
In the first year, I was getting sick of all the analytical proofs of linear algebra and calculus and the like, taking the limit as epsilon tends to zero and blablabla. And any theorem with Cauchy's name in it made me gag.
So the proofs and theorems in fluid mechanics, where you have recourse to physical happenings, was a breath of fresh air.

>>8116799
math grad student here

you're a retard

>>8117661
>>8117678
True on both counts. Any textbook writer worth their fucking salt will create an errata page free of charge online though. Some do. Like Hubbard for instance.

>>8117745
It will have occurred to you by now that A-level maths will be nothing like university maths.
I was great at A-level maths. Got an A* with some of the highest results in the school (and it was a damn good grammar school). And I was very happy to sit in a math class on a hot afternoon and just work my way through solving some equations. But I sucked at university maths. I would devour my way through the worked solutions easily enough, but it wasn't enough.

In fact, I recall now that the university (or perhaps it was the will of the individual lecturers) would actually limit the amount of past papers available to you. Very annoying. You only had access to something like the past 4 exam papers.

My grammar school was the opposite of this. I remember having access to something like 20 past papers for each of my A-level subjects. They really spoon-fed us well there. And they'd point out how the exam board had changed over the years, meaning which parts of the past papers we'd no longer have to know, as well as areas not covered by the past papers.

I remember being quite furious about this at university. I would think: "If I were a lecturer who wanted my students to do well, releasing the past exams would be my first priority." I remember hearing stories about students digging around in the library archives, looking for past examinations that might be stored there.

>>8117661
Its why i like larson. Ive gone through both calc 1 and 2 with it and only found one wrong answer in the back. It was a typo as well, where a y was replaced with an x.

>>8117775
it baffles my mind that you have had all these experiences and still seem to believe "memorize every single possible problem format and mechanically repeat someone else's work without ever having to demonstrate a modicum of independent thought" is an effective learning method that improves your understanding and not just a pedantic waste of time that earns you good grades and leaves you with no true comprehension of the material

>>8116799
Agreed

Whiny losers

>>8117679
Stupid weeaboo.
Take your pedophile cartoons back to >>>/a/.

>>8117775
That's really sad the way they trained you mindlessly work exam problems in the exact format you'd find them on the exam.

File: Imagery-hitagi-senjougahara-34535414-1920-1080.jpg (452KB, 1920x1080px) Image search: [Google]

452KB, 1920x1080px

>>8117799
>Daily reminder that 4chan's first boards were /a/-Anime General, /b/-Anime Random and /c/-Anime Cute

Oh wait, I forgot. You are like 12 and just started coming to 4chan last week. Yeah, you wouldn't know shit about fuck right?

4chan boards may now involve a bunch of other subjects but the sticky cum that holds us all together, regardless of board, is anime. This is a website for people who like anime to come and discuss things that are not anime, with other people who like anime.

If you don't like anime you don't belong here. There is always reddit for the 4chan-lite experience.

>>8117868
Sorry i don't live in the past if you want to discuss anime go to /a/

>>8117956
>i don't live in the past i just post on an imageboard

This is why I tend to attempt to prove lemmas rather than do exercises. I'll read through the text and when I get to a lemma I'll try to come up with the proof myself before reading the proof in the book. I find it pretty effective.

>>8117997
The exercises usually cover further topics and often get referenced later in the text.

>>8117650
ITT someone who has never been to a university

>>8118020
>>8117997
Good idea. I'll try this. Often I find higher level theorems/lemmas are a previous theorem with some additional structure/dressing on it. So, once you understand the underlying baseline theorem you can grasp the one with additional structure.

>>8117679
I don't know how this is done in USA, but in my country all math books for kids aged 11 and after have answers because the professors care about the process more than the result. You can't just copy the numbers from the end, you have to write every step that leads to the result.

>>8118051
This works for sub-Uni level math only, though.
If your exercise is to prove some statement, then you can't have "just the result" in the book, because the result is the statement you want to prove in the first place.

Like if the exercise i "Prove a = b", then having the solution "a = b" in the back of the book is entirely useless.

>>8118138
>facepalm.bmp

>>8116595

>dat cock

>>8117679
how the fuck would you cheat if you are self-studying?

>>8118246
>self-studying

The purpose of a textbook is to pass classes in college in order to get a good job. There's no reason to have a textbook if you aren't in a college setting.

File: 1325609784120.jpg (4KB, 145x130px) Image search: [Google]

4KB, 145x130px

>>8118256
>there's no reason to learn unless you're in college

>>8118256
b8

You gotta get resourceful with online materials. If I have a textbook and only a limited number of exercise solutions I'll only do the ones with the solutions provided so I can get real feedback.

File: CCWLFa6WMAAaMso.png (267KB, 560x498px) Image search: [Google]

267KB, 560x498px

>>8118256

>>8118276
There really isn't. It won't advance your career because employers don't care about skills you can't prove you have, and it's yet another thing you have to hide from your friends and family lest you be labeled as over-educated. You should get a hobby that isn't actively harmful to you.

>>8118480
What are interviews.
What is preparing for graduate school.
What is enjoying yourself.

>>8118480
I don't learn things so that some retard will pay me for knowing them; I do it because I genuinely like to know how things work. How the fuck do I become too educated for my friends and family? Is there a point where you study one chapter too much and they stop calling you at thanksgiving?

American literature are paid per page. That is why the calculus book is so fucking huge in america with lots of pictures and examples that even a retard can understand. A solution block and another solution block for even numbers just to milk out your money.


The literature in my uni is cheap as fuck, for calc1 calc2 , calc3, calc4. It weighs 3 times less than the huge calculus book almost every uni uses, it has one definition, one prof and 1-2 examples per page. Just get good op, just read the material again or get a better book with solutions and hints for every exercise.

>>8118480
>hide from your friends and family lest you be labeled as over-educated
Holy shit I feel sorry for you son. My parents aren't that batshit and I don't hang around idiots who are afraid of learning.

I learn things for my own sake. I don't need an employer to recognize my knowledge. I'll use it in my hobbies (learning itself isn't a hobby, it's a means to an end, though I do enjoy it) and likely in personal endeavors that may someday replace my job.

Real-life isn't going to have an answer key OP

>>8118480
wtf?

>>8119337
You might as well take Math courses, do homeworks, midterms, and final exams and never receive any grading on your work along with never getting feedback on what you're doing right or wrong since real life doesn't have answer keys.

>>8119337
kys