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Borrowed from New Latintensor(“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 GermanTensor) by Woldemar Voigt (1898)[1] 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 )
The tensor should really be called a “tensor of second rank,” because it has two indexes. A vector—with one index—is a tensor of the first rank, and a scalar—with no index—is a tensor of zero rank.
The array's dimensionality (number of indices needed to label a component) is called its order (also degree or rank).
In engineering usage the term is commonly used only for ranks of 2 (or more), contrasted with scalar and vectors.
Tensors operate in the context of a vector space and thus within a choice of basis vectors, but, because they express relationships between vectors, must be independent of any given choice of basis. This independence takes the form of a law of covariant and/or contravariant transformation that relates the arrays computed in different bases. The precise form of the transformation law determines the type (or valence) of the tensor. The tensor type is a pair of natural numbers (n, m), where n is the number of contravariant indices and m the number of covariant indices. The total order of the tensor is the sum n + m.