Math Help Books with Wrong Formulas

[Jason76]

At 20 dollars a pop usually, shouldn't they proofread what they publish? OK, in a textbook is a wrong Binomial Probability Distribution formula. Has anyone seen this phenomenon? I think it's ridiculous. You know how much it throws people off?

 

[Shannon Apple]

Try a computer science professor who doesn't proof read what he puts up on the slides. I mean, countless times, the guy has been corrected by a genius kid in my class. haha.

 

[Jason76]

Try a computer science professor who doesn't proof read what he puts up on the slides. I mean, countless times, the guy has been corrected by a genius kid in my class. haha.

Yeah, but proofreading a work that is going to be published and made into thousands of copies is a bit different.

 

[Shannon Apple]

Haha that's true, but being embarrassed on front of 250 people face-to-face is just as bad XD. These are the same type of people who write textbooks. It's meh.

The biggest blunder was his lecture on signed numbers. He mixed up his 1s and 0s. It was embarrassing. Did he change this in the lecture material since then? Of course not, it's still up for us to reference and it's teaching the exact opposite of what it should be. LOL!

 

[Page]

Och, Hate doing it and not good at doing it

 

[Jason76]

The person writing the book, himself or herself, should proofread it. It wouldn't take much time. Why won't they even bother to do that?

 

[Cosmic]

Yeah, these things are usually written by people who work for publishing houses, and who have zero qualifications. 😛 Like grad students and such.

 

[Bluezone777]

The person writing the book, himself or herself, should proofread it. It wouldn't take much time. Why won't they even bother to do that?

I'll take a guess and say it has something to do with money most likely. They want to get the most profit out of the book and I suppose hiring proofreaders would take away from the profit they would make off of selling the books. You really can't proofread your own work as people tend to have a tendency for unconsciously ignoring errors they have made in their work because their mind automatically reads it correctly so they never spot it themselves at least with typographical errors. There is also an issue with the length of the book as that probably played a role in missing the errors even if they did proofread it beforehand as a math book would likely be quite lengthy.

 

[Jason76]

They want to get the most profit out of the book and I suppose hiring proofreaders would take away from the profit they would make off of selling the books.

But it wouldn't take long for the author, himself or herself, to proofread the book. I mean, think about it, these people did hours of back-breaking homework to get to where they are, but they cannot even do that?

There is also an issue with the length of the book as that probably played a role in missing the errors even if they did proofread it beforehand as a math book would likely be quite lengthy.

The book in question isn't that lengthy.

 

[Cosmic]

Usually the author whose name is on the book didn't even write it (for textbooks). Definitely won't be proofreading!

 

[Bluezone777]

People can get lazy after they made their way into a good job and lose the stomach to do the sort of work that got them to where they are so it's possible. A shame really as the work should just be as rewarding as the pay check you get to do it and if it isn't the case then I would suggest they rethink what they are doing for a living if that is the case for them.