Are there any memorization techniques that exist for math students?

Question

I just watched this video on Ted.com entitled:

Joshua Foer: Feats of memory anyone can do

and it got me thinking about memory from a programmers perspective, and since programming and mathematics are so similar I figured I post here as well. There are so many abstract concepts and syntactic nuances that are constantly encountered, and yet we still manage to retain that information.

The memory palace may help in remembering someone's name, a sequence of numbers, or a random story, but are there any memorization techniques that can better aid those learning new math concepts?

Answer 1

You shouldn't try to learn mathematics through memorization at all. It will get you nowhere: anything that can be memorized can be looked up these days. What you should try to learn is the underlying concepts and the way they relate to each other. If you understand those well enough, you won't need to memorize anything.

Think of learning mathematics as being like learning, say, chess. Would you learn how to play chess by memorizing openings? Well, maybe that could work, but it's probably a better idea to learn how to play chess by, y'know, playing a lot of chess.

Answer 2

For math there is no better way to remember than to just understand. Though the time required to reach that point may be too difficult to forget.

Answer 3

For propositional logic operations, you can remember their truth tables as follows:

Let 0 stand for falsity and 1 for truth. For the conjunction operation use the mnemonic of the minimum of two numbers. For the disjunction operation, use the mnemonic of the maximum of two numbers. For the truth table for the material conditional (x->y), you can use max(1-x, y). For negation you can use 1-x.

Answer 4

If you say that the techniques that exist to help memory are amazing, I would not disagree. Visualization, they say, is the best way to memorize. I have not seen or heard of the "memory palace" other than what you wrote here and maybe in passing on an infomercial one time or another (am I correct in understanding it as a visualization technique?) I can say that I believe in the power of any visualization that helps in understanding or even just remembering mathematical concepts. The difficulty is in finding the personal imagery that works. Only after much meditation have I ever found such imagery that works for me on any particular problem I am considering, but it would not be something I could translate in order to benefit the random person.