Very few of the maths textbooks I've read have had the answers to the exercises in them. If the author wants to put in a worked example, that will be in the chapter itself, rather than the exercises.
In maths, you know when you've got an exercise right, and so you don't need the answer written out for you. If you're looking up the answer before you get that feeling, you're cheating yourself. You won't learn the material.
It would seem weird if someone put the answers in the textbook, like having the answers to a newspaper crossword on the same page as the crossword itself. You'd have to exert willpower in order to not look at them.
The whole point of the exercises is to play with the ideas until you understand what they're for. If you don't at least partly invent the subject yourself, you never really 'get' it.
Textbooks are really guides to how to reinvent the field, what order to think about things in, what are the cleanest ways to break up the patterns, what are the best notations to use, so you can reinvent it all at a reasonable speed rather than having to spend a whole lifetime on each problem.
If you literally can't do the exercises despite having read the chapter, then it's a bad textbook. Throw it away and get a better one.
Very few of the maths textbooks I've read have had the answers to the exercises in them.
Well it's been a while - by my recollection is that (at fresh and sophomore level at least), the better textbooks always did have answer keys in the back (at least for a significant subset of the problems). But as we all know -- the better textbooks are few and far between. And college is filled with lousy textbooks that get thrown at students for who knows what reasons.
To the extent that they think lousy textbooks are the norm.
> In maths, you know when you've got an exercise right, and so you don't need the answer written out for you.
No, I might think I have the correct answer but I cannot know until I have seen the correct answer. I can justify any false answer that's not obviously false for myself which is why I need to compare.
In maths, you know when you've got an exercise right, and so you don't need the answer written out for you. If you're looking up the answer before you get that feeling, you're cheating yourself. You won't learn the material.
It would seem weird if someone put the answers in the textbook, like having the answers to a newspaper crossword on the same page as the crossword itself. You'd have to exert willpower in order to not look at them.
The whole point of the exercises is to play with the ideas until you understand what they're for. If you don't at least partly invent the subject yourself, you never really 'get' it.
Textbooks are really guides to how to reinvent the field, what order to think about things in, what are the cleanest ways to break up the patterns, what are the best notations to use, so you can reinvent it all at a reasonable speed rather than having to spend a whole lifetime on each problem.
If you literally can't do the exercises despite having read the chapter, then it's a bad textbook. Throw it away and get a better one.