Ilan Vardi once recommended a reading a certain error-riddled chess endgame book as an excellent way to learn chess endgame technique "Once you find all the errors and correct them, you'll be a strong Expert," he said. The errors weren't intentional, but knowing they were hiding and trying to find them was certainly more fun for me than studying another, much higher quality book that didn't have many mistakes in it On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 10:19 AM, Dan Asimov <dasimov@earthlink.net> wrote:
<< On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 3:52 PM, Fred lunnon <fred.lunnon@gmail.com> wrote:
Did you have any particularly (counter-) instructive instances in mind? [Present company excepted, naturally!] WFL
Actually, no. My main reason for such a textbook would be to encourage students to read through all proofs carefully and skeptically, and not just the ones in the textbook. I envision a book that is still focused on one topic (such as Number Theory), not a textbook on reading proofs, per se.
Having students read proofs skeptically is of course an important goal, but I don't see the need for such an eccentric textbook in order to accomplish it. (They also need to have model proofs to learn from as well, and I suspect they'd get very annoyed with such an untrustworthy book very soon.)
The goal can be accomplished by judicious use of classroom time, HW, & exams.
--Dan
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