Personally, I only understood logarithms after memorizing the log laws using spaced repetition. I had been taught logarithms before descriptively, but only once the equations were in my head could my brain make sense of how they work.
- Log laws
- Exponent laws
- Derivative rules
- Probability laws
- Combinations/Permutations
- Matrix algebra
- more?
When you're reading through math derivations, or trying to work one out yourself, you absolutely need to have some basic literacy in these rules.