I agree that math formula are hard to memorize because the language is terrible. It's from an age when things were handwritten and movements of the hand were to be conserved as much as possible.
I used to have a bit of trouble with math but I found out , somewhat counter-intuitively, that the key, at least for me, is rote memorization of formula. When I was having trouble I always tried to understand how to derive rules from proof but this was impractical when trying to do higher mathematics as the level of abstraction got to be too much. I found it just easier to simply memorize algebraic formula, derivatives, integrals, properties of infinite series, etc with flash cards or repetitive exercises and then apply them as if they were simply given. Maybe I'll never be a great mathematician, but all I really want is to be able to read CS papers and understand analogue electronics.
"movements of the hand were to be conserved as much as possible."
Citation needed. I seriously doubt writing speed was the limiting factor for any mathematician (and that by at least an order of magnitude, but that is guessing). For some, paper might have been expensive, but even then, I doubt it forced them to write succinctly.
Your method probably is a good one for being doing passive maths and probably will be of help for doing real math, too. Even the memorization of such things as multiplication tables helps there. For example, it may help you spot that all numbers in some sequence are prime, divisible by 17, or whatever, and that, in turn, can lead to a proof (I remember reading about a famous mathematician numerically approximating some integral, immediately seeing "hey, but that looks like X" (with X being something like log(27) or the sine of the square root of three or so), and from there, getting the inspiration to algebraically solve a class of problems, but cannot find a link for that)
I used to have a bit of trouble with math but I found out , somewhat counter-intuitively, that the key, at least for me, is rote memorization of formula. When I was having trouble I always tried to understand how to derive rules from proof but this was impractical when trying to do higher mathematics as the level of abstraction got to be too much. I found it just easier to simply memorize algebraic formula, derivatives, integrals, properties of infinite series, etc with flash cards or repetitive exercises and then apply them as if they were simply given. Maybe I'll never be a great mathematician, but all I really want is to be able to read CS papers and understand analogue electronics.