Same, I never could remember formulas at school. What I did during exams was to "reconstruct" them visually: I'd sketch a few graphs at various random points and try to derive a formula from there. I also remember successfully solving problems by sketching geometrical shapes (triangles, lines etc.) and just trying to reason with basic logic + trial and error.
I realized back then that a lot of math (at least school-level math) can be grokked if you visualize it geometrically/spatially, as manipulatable objects in space. I don't know why our teachers rarely explained it like that. For most students, it was like strange symbol manipulation rules that you must remember by heart and can't derive from scratch.
Currently I'm fascinated with the way neural networks can be understood as a problem of trying to untangle tangled manifolds (to make them linearly separable) by "folding"/distorting space, using basic matrix manipulations... That way it's not magic anymore, it's something which appears so straightforward.
I realized back then that a lot of math (at least school-level math) can be grokked if you visualize it geometrically/spatially, as manipulatable objects in space. I don't know why our teachers rarely explained it like that. For most students, it was like strange symbol manipulation rules that you must remember by heart and can't derive from scratch.
Currently I'm fascinated with the way neural networks can be understood as a problem of trying to untangle tangled manifolds (to make them linearly separable) by "folding"/distorting space, using basic matrix manipulations... That way it's not magic anymore, it's something which appears so straightforward.