English Explanatory Dictionary

tensor

English dictionary entry

Meanings

noun
  1. A muscle that tightens or stretches a part, or renders it tense.
  2. A mathematical object that describes linear relations on scalars, vectors, matrices and other algebraic objects, and is represented as a multidimensional array.
  3. A multidimensional array with (at least) two dimensions.
  4. A norm operation on the quaternion algebra.
verb
  1. To compute the tensor product of two tensors or algebraic structures.

Pronunciation

/ˈtɛn.sə/ /ˈtɛn.sɔː/ LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-tensor.wav /ˈtɛn.sɚ/ /ˈtɛn.sɔɹ/

Word forms

tensor tensors tensores tensoring tensored

Etymology

Borrowed from New Latin tensor (“that which stretches”), equivalent to tense + -or. Anatomical sense from 1704. Introduced in the 1840s by William Rowan Hamilton as an algebraic quantity unrelated to the modern notion of tensor. The contemporary mathematical meaning was introduced (as German Tensor) by Woldemar Voigt (1898) and adopted in English from 1915 (in the context of general relativity), obscuring the earlier Hamiltonian sense. The mathematical object is so named because an early application of tensors was the study of materials stretching under tension. (See, for example, Cauchy stress tensor on Wikipedia.Wikipedia )

Derived words

tensor algebra tensor field tensorial tensor operator tensor product tonic tensor tympani syndrome

Translations

Arabic: مُوتَر Bulgarian: тензор Finnish: tensori German: Tensor Greek: τανυστής Italian: tensore Kazakh: тензор Norwegian: tensor Polish: tensor Russian: те́нзор Serbo-Croatian: tenzor Swedish: tensor Tagalog: katuganhan Tagalog: katuganuhan Turkish: tensör
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