Hi. I’m a new member on the forum. I wrote a blog post about my technique for memorizing equations. I’d really appreciate if it people here could take a look at it and tell me what they think: http://improbablestatistician.com/2018/02/20/how-to-memorize-equations
I’ll just briefly summarize. I originally thought I could use a system similar to the PAO system for cards. What I found is that equations have too many possible subunits (x, y, z, pi, psi, M, m ), too many relationships (x^x, x+x, x/x) and too many repetitions of subgroups of symbols. It’s just not as simple as cards that have only 13 possible options.
So I thought it made sense to base the approach on the story memory. A straightforward application works to a degree but gets challenging as many of the things I try to memorize can have more than 50 separate pieces.
I assume people who memorize Japanese and Chinese characters must have similar types of challenges so if any one has experience with that and thinks it would be helpful, I’d really appreciate hearing about it.
‘Understanding’ the equation only gets you so far because many of the equations in statistics, my field, just are what they are. For instance, block matrix inversion. Block matrix - Wikipedia
It’s not impossible to come up with descriptive stories that give the sense of why they might look the way they look. This works sometimes but doesn’t work when it 1. requires you to put a lot of work into re-deriving results which probably took a days or weeks or years to derive in the first place 2. need to be much more fluid and automatic if you are going to have any hope of calculating things on the fly 3. basically amounts to layering incorrect metaphors on to parts of your equation which, in my opinion, amounts to mnemonics by other means especially in cases where the derivation is more mechanical than technical.
Thanks.