Comment by philip-b

Hello Michael, I've read your 2 articles about anki. I am an avid user of anki myself and I use it for math as well.

In your 2 articles you tell about using it to understand and retain memory of an Alphago paper and to do the same for the theorem about orthogonal diagonalizability of normal matrices.

I wonder, how do you organize anki cards and in which order do you study them? Personally I put all cards in one deck and anki shows them in kinda random order, so I might get a question about convex optimization, then a question on numerical linear algebra, then a question on some dance moves. I take it you do it in a different way? Because you create many small cards for a topic I think you would spend too much time context switching if you did random order like me. For this reason I make larger cards, e.g. "Prove that for any linear operator on a finite dimensional complex vector space there is a basis such that the operator has upper triangular matrix in it"; and when preparing for an exam in institute I might even create a card "Definition, existence, uniqueness, and computational complexity of SVD". Also I think creating small cards might be bad for chunking, i.e. you won't get large chunks of all the related knowledge about a theorem and instead you will have small chunks - a chunk per card.

Another question is how do you add all this information to anki? Anki obviously sucks as an exploratory medium. I often find that even clearing up my paper notes, taking photos of them, cutting them, and putting them into anki takes a lot of time; typing it up in LaTeX is even longer. Any tips or insights here?