MathOverflow will be down for maintenance for approximately 3 hours, starting Monday evening (06/24/2013) at approximately 9:00 PM Eastern time (UTC-4).
show/hide this revision's text 2 deleted 2 characters in body

I like to keep in mind a simplified (and sometimes imprecise) version of the theorem. For example, consider the Hahn-Banach Theorem. When I think about it the first thing that comes to my mind is

"A linear functional $f$ dominated by $p$ in a subspace can be extended to a linear functional $F$ dominated by $p$ in the whole space."

And then I might may or might not remember the details. I would say the same thing about proofs. I try to keep in mind the main steps and other results the proof relies on.

show/hide this revision's text 1 [made Community Wiki]

I like to keep in mind a simplified (and sometimes imprecise) version of the theorem. For example, consider the Hahn-Banach Theorem. When I think about it the first thing that comes to my mind is

"A linear functional $f$ dominated by $p$ in a subspace can be extended to a linear functional $F$ dominated by $p$ in the whole space."

And then I might or might not remember the details. I would say the same thing about proofs. I try to keep in mind the main steps and other results the proof relies on.