The Feynman Technique

Richard Feynman, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist known for his extremely lucid style of exposition, once said 

"I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something." 

How can we tell whether we truly know something or merely know its name? The difference, I think, is whether you can offer explanations as opposed to trivia. Richard Feynman developed what has come to be called the Feynman Technique for studying, which efficiently builds deep understanding through a structured explanation process—forgoing the (unfortunately) common-place but ineffective applications of rote memorization. 

This is intended to be a very brief guide to using the Feynman Technique to study and understand mathematics. We'll use the following adage (dubiously attributed to Albert Einstein) as inspiration.

If you can't explain it simply, then you don't understand it well enough.

Grab a piece of paper and let's get started!