Memorizing math is besides the point. Books are good at remembering.
At university we usually get one or two pages of paper that we can take with us into math exams as remembering that stuff isn't the point. In one exam we could even take as many books as we would like with us.
If you want to understand math the mathematical way you have to ask yourself how you can use the definition for the limit to prove the theorems that you have at your course.
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word-for-word memorization is not useless in math because if one wants to memorize a formal definition of, let's say, the limit word-for-word, that is not useless.
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But in math you don't get any advantage from knowing the word-for-word definition.
It doesn't help you to understand what the definition is about.
Either you can use the definition of the limit to prove things or you can't. Knowing the words of a particular expression doesn't help.
Or you just want to use math to solve real world problem but then you don't need definitions at all.
Could you write out a proof of the mean value theorem from hand (you can look up definitions but not the proof itself)?