Stumbling Robot is written by me, Rori. (Subscribe to the blog!) I hope you forgive my mistakes, omissions, gaps in logic, and occasional handwaving, and find what was meant: a map to help other students find their own path.

What is going on here?

On these pages I compile my complete solutions and full explanations to exercises in math texts.  The goal is to teach and comment on this material, hopefully helping people learn from these examples.  The blog lists all of the posts in chronological order.  There exists an index to help people find exercises they are looking for.  Tags, descriptive titles, and a search box should also help guide people to questions they are interested in.  I may make non-solution blog entries from time to time: book reviews, meta comments on the blog, and interesting math that comes up outside of textbooks seem like the most likely topics for these extra entries.

Why should I trust your solutions?

You shouldn’t!  The only guarantee I make is that these solutions contain all sorts of errors.  If you find them, please leave a comment so that I can fix them.  Also, if you have some vastly better approach, leave that in the comments.  I have tried to use only the tools and theorems available in the textbook at the point the exercise occurs; so, if a problem easily solved by L’Hopital’s rule appears before a proof of that theorem, then we’ll have to tackle the problem without it.  That’s the goal, but there may be an occasional exception if it’s something tedious that I’d rather avoid (a section of 30 problems proving various sets are sub-vector spaces without the subspace criterion in Apostol, Volume 2 comes to mind).

Who are you?

I’m a half-alien, half-robot, half-human math student studying at a large(ish) research university. Writing up solutions to math problems seemed like a fun thing to do that might help people. That’s why this is in blog format rather than static PDF: hopefully people will give feedback and propose alternate strategies in the comments, rather than passively absorbing solutions from a downloaded file. You can contact me here if you feel compelled to get in touch.

You can also find stumblingrobot’s privacy policy and disclosure statement if you are interested.