One of the most effective ways I remember studying for vocabulary quizzes in high school was through flash cards. During my time in college, I wondered why a similar method was not used to help study for other things, particularly in math and math-like classes where new definitions and concepts are introduced everyday. As a result of this, I wrote an initial flash cards script to help me with my advanced calculus class. Because of my success in this class, I continued developing flash cards to help study many other concepts. Here,  I have decided to share some of those concepts with you.

The general concept behind how I develop the flash cards is simple. Each flash card consists of a question on one side and the answer to that question on the other. For definitions, the question is generally of the form “What is the definition of _____” and the answer will generally go “The definition of _____ is _____”. This may vary a bit, but I try to keep it in this context to allow for searching easier. The other things I generally put onto flash cards are Lemmas/Theorems/Corollaries. These are a bit more difficult to put on flash cards though. The flash cards are still in a question and answer format, but I tried to make the question center around what the question being asked that led to the development of the Lemma/Theorem/Corollary was. Sometimes I may be off-base with these questions, and I’ve had to go back and re-do these questions a number of times. However, I hope they can be helpful.

For algorithms, which are a large part of this site, I generally asked to include the pseudocode for the given algorithm. However since pseudocode is far from formal, this can lead to a bit of a debate among whether you feel that your answer is the same as mine.

The AMS Graduate Student Blog lists some other sites where you can get math generated flash cards.