I was looking around on the internet and I found some notes with homework appended to them ([for those interested, it is math](https://math.la.asu.edu/~halsmith/MDS.pdf)). What struck me is that these questions are not only lengthy, notationally challenging, but also appears to be quite complicated. For a biology course no less. 

**Can any authors or professors illuminate as to how (i.e. the process) these assignment questions are developed?** I thought about this and found several scenarios which are quite interesting to think about, but at the same time, ridiculous to me. 

*For professors/authors:*

**scenario a**: the professor/author goes home and quietly sits in front of a fireplace and starts brain storming weird scenarios and writes down these random thoughts

**scenario b**: the professor/author demands his graduate students to pump out 10 questions on a weekly basis, the rest is history

**scenario c**: the professor/author picks up another book and make adjustments to questions that looks interesting and then puts into his own book. But then this sort of becomes a chicken-egg problem. What about a completely new field that no one has touched before?

**scenario d**: there exist a large central depository of problems that professors submit to it, and draws question from it, a massive database out of reach of any students. This is some fringe conspiracy theory. 

**scenario e**: [The Hamilton approach](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Rowan_Hamilton#Quaternions). Ideas just flies out at random say when you are taking a shower, or buying some groceries and then you jog them down very quickly and then send it to a depository. Kind of like **scenario a** but much more random. 

What about people who are cross discipline and working on their own field? Are there dedicated personnel who is neither an author, nor a professor, but just works on developing these assignments all day? This question just opens up a can of worms. 

Please feed my curiosity, I would love to know how they are developed because maybe I will also develop my own someday. I know there exist some distinction between authors and professors (although the two coincides on a great degree), let me know if things done differently between different professions.