> Why do most introductory math textbooks not contain solutions?
I offer a couple of Free texts, one of which is pretty popular (http://joshua.smcvt.edu/linearalgebra/). The answers, completely step-by-step solved, are available. I can give you two reasons.
1) Preparing good questions and giving answers is about half the work. On my page you'll see that the book is 500 pages and the answers are 400 pages.
And it is not the half that is fun, or that gets you credit. I find that compiling the answers greatly increases the quality of the book because I keep going back and adjusting the presentation, etc. But others don't think that. Rather the opposite; I have been told that it is work only appropriate for grad students.
2) I have gotten a fair number of emails along the lines of "I'd like to adopt your book but since anyone can download the answers, I cannot teach out of it."
It has not in the past proven to be a fruitful strategy for me to inform the email writer that the first thing any 2018 undergrad does on getting a text asignment is to google for the answers pdf, and that those students always succeed.
So one reason to not provide answers is to get more adoptions. This ties in with (1) because my five year reviews are not impressed that random self-learners find the text useful. They ask about adoptions.
Brent is one of the greatest teachers I've ever experienced. I used to take classes from him (and TA some others he taught) and was consistently blown away by his enthusiasm and capacity for sharing concepts. He has a great essay on pedagogy as well (https://byorgey.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/abstraction-intuiti...)
If you're interested in learning some of the beautiful foundations of functional programming, I highly recommend checking out the lecture notes and assignments from his Penn CIS 194 class (http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~cis194/spring13/lectures.html)
"He concluded his talk by adding: 'I see that there are many young people here; as an old man, a little advice... Life can set us a lot of snares, a lot of bumps, we can fail a thousand times, in life, in love, in the social struggle, but if we search for it we'll have the strength to get up again and start over. The most beautiful thing about the day is that it dawns. There is always a dawn after the night has passed. Don't forget it, kids. The only losers are the ones who stop fighting.'"
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals."
Heh, it is amusing that the quote ends with "far-off Palestine". In the mid-90s I returned from living in the middle east for 6 months as a student (Jordan, Israel and Egypt). I personally witnessed an event and upon returning I was reading about said event in a US newspaper and was shocked at how wrong it was. This was the first time I experienced this effect. However, instead of turning to other parts of the paper and trusting what they said, I lost all faith in newspapers on that day and have not read one since. If I know they lied or, more generously, misunderstood what happened about something I know personally about, how can I ever trust anything they write about things I don't know about personally? I can't, I won't, and I haven't.
I offer a couple of Free texts, one of which is pretty popular (http://joshua.smcvt.edu/linearalgebra/). The answers, completely step-by-step solved, are available. I can give you two reasons.
1) Preparing good questions and giving answers is about half the work. On my page you'll see that the book is 500 pages and the answers are 400 pages.
And it is not the half that is fun, or that gets you credit. I find that compiling the answers greatly increases the quality of the book because I keep going back and adjusting the presentation, etc. But others don't think that. Rather the opposite; I have been told that it is work only appropriate for grad students.
2) I have gotten a fair number of emails along the lines of "I'd like to adopt your book but since anyone can download the answers, I cannot teach out of it."
It has not in the past proven to be a fruitful strategy for me to inform the email writer that the first thing any 2018 undergrad does on getting a text asignment is to google for the answers pdf, and that those students always succeed.
So one reason to not provide answers is to get more adoptions. This ties in with (1) because my five year reviews are not impressed that random self-learners find the text useful. They ask about adoptions.