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While this is true I tend to solve problems in bulk. I do not want to post 16 questions all at once for people to check my proofs. Sometimes people think you ar

While this is true I tend to solve problems in bulk. I do not want to post 16 questions all at once for people to check my proofs. Sometimes people think you are a student and are trying to get answers for homework assignments. It would be better if authors would write textbooks aimed at beginners that are self-studying and thus provide solutions. The author of this textbook has a missed opportunity by ignoring to provide solutions. I don't recommend this book to anyone for this reason.

dan-robertson 7y ago
People think you are a student trying to cheat if you just post the problem (or worse, a photograph of it). People will be more receptive if you post the problem, your attempted proof, and ask for some review/verification. Certainly it doesn’t look like you’re trying to cheat (I don’t know about other universities but at mine you weren’t marked for correct problem sheet answers; the purpose was to improve understanding so this kind of posting online for help would be quite reasonable) The tricky case is with a problem where you don’t know where to start, it’s hard to ask a question like “here’s a problem and I don’t know where to start. Can you try to give me a hint?” But certainly explicitly asking for a hint will reflect better on you and adding some ideas you had (and why you couldn’t make them work or didn’t think they would work) would improve it more. The other tricky case would be if you were missing something you never thought about, eg never thinking to check that your functions were well-defined. These systematic errors are hard but could hopefully be found by asking for help with verification with a subset of your solutions. Posting solutions for verification/reading would hopefully also help you improve the clarity of the argument and your thought (and I guess it might help with style too). Hopefully over time, you would find that your confidence in your own verification abilities increases and that your rate of errors if you do ask for verification decreases. A final issue you might see is that if a question is elementary for those whom you are asking for verification (and this will happen a lot however advanced the topic), you may get a reply like “why not just say <some short solution>?” This is about as useful as an author-provided solution but not so great for proof verification. (The reason for these answers is that often exercises are hinting at some higher-level structure/theorem which you don’t yet know about and if you did know about it, you could use that knowledge to much more easily solve the problem) ———— I wonder how useful author-provided solutions really are. If the exercise is to prove something (as many good exercises are) then your solution is never going to be the same as the author’s and looking at the author’s proof won’t tell you if yours is any good.
- solaris- 7y ago
  I'm not talking about posting a question online and asking "how do I solve this" but posting bulk proofs (that you did) and asking someone to verify them all at once. This can be side-stepped if the author provided solutions. Yes, the author's solutions may be different than yours, but that isn't a good reason to not include solutions. >Hopefully over time, you would find that your confidence in your own verification abilities increases and that your rate of errors if you do ask for verification decreases. Yes, but without feedback this is hard to do. This book is not for self-studiers, least not in current form. It seems like there is a disconnect between authors and self-studiers. I can understand if the textbook is written so solutions aren't provided such that universities will buy the book, but there is a market for those no longer in classrooms that want to learn and an author that takes the time to provide solutions helps tremendously.
  - deleted 7y ago
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dorchadas 7y ago
The one good thing about this is that, if it's a popular textbook, the problems are likely already there. Though of course your proofs might be different and/or take a different approach.

dan-robertson 7y ago

People think you are a student trying to cheat if you just post the problem (or worse, a photograph of it). People will be more receptive if you post the problem, your attempted proof, and ask for some review/verification. Certainly it doesn’t look like you’re trying to cheat (I don’t know about other universities but at mine you weren’t marked for correct problem sheet answers; the purpose was to improve understanding so this kind of posting online for help would be quite reasonable) The tricky case is with a problem where you don’t know where to start, it’s hard to ask a question like “here’s a problem and I don’t know where to start. Can you try to give me a hint?” But certainly explicitly asking for a hint will reflect better on you and adding some ideas you had (and why you couldn’t make them work or didn’t think they would work) would improve it more. The other tricky case would be if you were missing something you never thought about, eg never thinking to check that your functions were well-defined. These systematic errors are hard but could hopefully be found by asking for help with verification with a subset of your solutions. Posting solutions for verification/reading would hopefully also help you improve the clarity of the argument and your thought (and I guess it might help with style too). Hopefully over time, you would find that your confidence in your own verification abilities increases and that your rate of errors if you do ask for verification decreases. A final issue you might see is that if a question is elementary for those whom you are asking for verification (and this will happen a lot however advanced the topic), you may get a reply like “why not just say <some short solution>?” This is about as useful as an author-provided solution but not so great for proof verification. (The reason for these answers is that often exercises are hinting at some higher-level structure/theorem which you don’t yet know about and if you did know about it, you could use that knowledge to much more easily solve the problem) ———— I wonder how useful author-provided solutions really are. If the exercise is to prove something (as many good exercises are) then your solution is never going to be the same as the author’s and looking at the author’s proof won’t tell you if yours is any good.

solaris- 7y ago
I'm not talking about posting a question online and asking "how do I solve this" but posting bulk proofs (that you did) and asking someone to verify them all at once. This can be side-stepped if the author provided solutions. Yes, the author's solutions may be different than yours, but that isn't a good reason to not include solutions. >Hopefully over time, you would find that your confidence in your own verification abilities increases and that your rate of errors if you do ask for verification decreases. Yes, but without feedback this is hard to do. This book is not for self-studiers, least not in current form. It seems like there is a disconnect between authors and self-studiers. I can understand if the textbook is written so solutions aren't provided such that universities will buy the book, but there is a market for those no longer in classrooms that want to learn and an author that takes the time to provide solutions helps tremendously.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

dorchadas 7y ago

The one good thing about this is that, if it's a popular textbook, the problems are likely already there. Though of course your proofs might be different and/or take a different approach.