# Double backslash \\ does not work in equation environment

My problem is that inside equation environment double backslash \\ does not seem to work as expected to force a line break:

\begin{equation*}

\fontsize{12}{15} \text{1.  (a) State the Mean Value Theorem.}\\
\fontsize{12}{15}\text{(b) Consider the function}
g:\mathbb{R} \rightarrow \mathbb{R}
\end{equation*}

In this piece of code, I couldn't find a way to make that \\ work. I want element (b) to be where I draw it with red.

What is the problem with this code and how can I make that \\ work?

• That's normal: equation is for one-line formulae. For multilined equations, use one of the amsmath environments: gather (centred, no alignment points), align (one or several groups of equation, each with its alignment points), alignat (a variant), flalign (another variant) or multline. You can take a look at the doc or at the more general mathmode document. Oct 2 '14 at 21:25
• Are you sure that mathmode is even the right way to typeset your example. The text passages in your example make me think, that only a part of it is actually math. If you want to type exam questions have a look at the exsheets package for example. Oct 2 '14 at 21:39
• If it is just about itemizing thing, no exam sheets, have a look at packages like enumitem, paralist or the new tasks (ok, that one has something to do with exsheets). Oct 2 '14 at 21:43
• Or the older, but very good at its job, shortlst package. Oct 2 '14 at 21:53
• Consider also the robust exam document class. :) Oct 3 '14 at 0:25

The equation environment is not designed for line-breaking. For this purpose exist the environments multline, gather, align, etc (and their starred versions) provided by the amsmath package. (There also exists the eqnarray of LaTeX but it isn't recommended).

For your example you should use the enumerate environment (and if you want something more personalized combine with the enumitem package).

## Example

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage{amssymb}
\begin{document}
\begin{enumerate}
\item
\begin{enumerate}
\item State the Mean Value Theorem.
\item Consider the function $g:\mathbb{R} \rightarrow \mathbb{R}$
\end{enumerate}
\end{enumerate}
\end{document}