> The act of taking notes with a pen and paper, to synthesize thoughts into symbols and sentence structures, is far more meaningful than looking at the note again imo.
Absolutely this. I'm working on teaching myself abstract math with help from a friend on Discord who has his PhD and is willing to check my proofs and such, and just the act of writing things down helps so much. Especially linear algebra, where I kept losing track of all the summations and what stood for what while I was just reading. Writing down the stuff, and adding my own annotations to the steps explicitly elucidating why a step was possible, did more for me than ever reading back over them did, though I do admit sometimes it helped if it was a fresh concept; but oftentimes, it was just the act of writing that did it for me.
