> [I do not] carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books. ...The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but

> [I do not] carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books. ...The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think. -- Albert Einstein Source: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein The above quote seems to be the genesis of the folk trope, "Never commit to memory that which can be looked up in a book." To me, what you describe above is why people think they are "bad at math," because they cannot commit to memory long equations with foreign-looking symbols. Even the function sheets provided during some math exams are needlessly obtuse, for the sake of proving whether or not somebody can remember exactly what the different constants or inputs into the functions are. It would be like encountering a function in somebody's code that had cryptically-named parameters without comments or documentation.