"Mathematics is not a spectator sport". No quote was more useful to get me through Uni, and enjoying it in the process. I'm a software engineer, not a mathemati

"Mathematics is not a spectator sport". No quote was more useful to get me through Uni, and enjoying it in the process. I'm a software engineer, not a mathematician. That being said, a decade later I still catch myself often "glancing" over equations in papers and textbooks, and have to force myself to really look at them and check that I indeed "got them". I don't know what it is, maybe I just need more training/habit around it. There's a tendency for me to half-consciously say to myself "yeahyeah I'll get it from reading the text" or "I'll get to it later", which usually does not work. For more important equations (Taylor, sinc function, all the variations of Fourier Series, Fourier Transform, DFT, DTFT) I actually write them down as flash cards in Anki and learn them verbatim. Yes, I have to understand them otherwise it's useless, but being able to just "make the equations appear" in my head to look at and work with them is invaluable. Even after understanding, I won't derive the Taylor Series myself (and even if I did, I would not always want to repeat that), so the old adage that understanding is better than rote memorization is useless here.