Am I the only one who enjoys taking notes? But more in the sense of recording knowledge so that I have it in perpetuity.

For instance, I have almost completely forgotten how to solve ODEs, even though I had a good command of it when I learned it (by solving practice problems). In that sense, I wish that my prior self had taken good notes, so that I wouldn't have to dig up source material if I wanted to relearn it again.

Everyone likes nicely typeset LaTeX -- why not apply that craftsmanship to preserving academic notes?

It's not that I don't enjoy taking notes - I liked to take notes, distill knowledge, make "cheatsheets" outside of class.

To this day I still take countless notes when I learn new things, I just find it incredibly distracting to have to take notes during a lecture/class because it doesn't allow me to process the material properly.

>In that sense, I wish that my prior self had taken good notes, so that I wouldn't have to dig up source material if I wanted to relearn it again.

I don't really get it. If you've truly forgotten, you have to relearn it one way or another. What makes you think your past student self improvising a half-assed explanation in the moment could do better than a professional author who was already an expert when they wrote the book?

Because you never truly forget something. If you took effort to generate a rehash of your own mental brain model, first you will recognize it again and thus don't need to relearn everything, and second you already have it in your own brain model, instead of needing to invent it first from someone's else brain model.