How do you remember parameters? I'm currently doing research in pseudorandomness, which involves a zoo of wonderful objects such as pseudorandom generators, randomness extractors, expander graphs, etc. I find it a fascinating topic, but one thing that drives me crazy is the glut of parameters that are involved. I understand that these objects are very complex, but I cannot help but break out into a sweat when I see "Let $G$ be a standard $(\alpha,V,\epsilon^2,k,\delta)$-pseudorandom widget...". Then I have to flip back in the paper or find another paper (which probably uses a different parameterization) and try to remember what all $\alpha,V,\epsilon,k$ and $\delta$ all meant.

It takes me quite a while to acquire a feeling for "good" parameter settings versus "bad" parameter settings, versus "natural" settings versus "easy" settings. 

There's probably no magic bullet for this issue - but I was wondering if other people had some method of managing the "parameter explosion" so that it's easier to retain in memory for a longer period of time?

Thanks!
My research practices, when I go into new research domain, cover combination of memory management, mnemonic, notes and other practices.

I have no one recipe, cause each is dependent on nature of given domain.

For some inspiration and sake of discussion, here is and example that came now into my mind:

Go through papers into a few iterations:


First, to get adjusted to domain and get first intuition about approaches and notations.
Next step is preparation to "clusterization" of papers.

prepare list of tags representing approaches, notations, features and other interesting me properties.
Before I start tagging I go through papers and evaluate my tags, correct appropriately.
Finally I tag papers

Then I process papers according to tags in groups: with similar notation, approach...

Thanks to working with papers sharing common properties, you can concentrate on differences.
I prepare notes in form of MindMap with FreeMind. To easily reach "what was what".

After processing papers grouped in sets with tags, try look at whole area with all groups to get boarder view.
Now is step of looking thought whole domain to see connections and differences. When I can't remember details, I check-out in my MindMap to remind, what was what.


Try to avoid overloading your memory, when it's unneeded, use: Mnemonics and Art Of Memory techniques. Use MindMapping.