From my First A-to-Z: Tensor

Of course I can’t just take a break for the sake of having a break. I feel like I have to do something of interest. So why not make better use of my several thousand past entries and repost one? I’d just reblog it except WordPress’s system for that is kind of rubbish. So here’s what I wrote, when I was first doing A-to-Z’s, back in summer of 2015. Somehow I was able to post three of these a week. I don’t know how.

I had remembered this essay as mostly describing the boring part of tensors, that we usually represent them as grids of numbers and then symbols with subscripts and superscripts. I’m glad to rediscover that I got at why we do such things to numbers and subscripts and superscripts.

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Tensor.

The true but unenlightening answer first: a tensor is a regular, rectangular grid of numbers. The most common kind is a two-dimensional grid, so that it looks like a matrix, or like the times tables. It might be square, with as many rows as columns, or it might be rectangular.

It can also be one-dimensional, looking like a row or a column of numbers. Or it could be three-dimensional, rows and columns and whole levels of numbers. We don’t try to visualize that. It can be what we call zero-dimensional, in which case it just looks like a solitary number. It might be four- or more-dimensional, although I confess I’ve never heard of anyone who actually writes out such a thing. It’s just so hard to visualize.

You can add and subtract tensors if they’re of compatible sizes. You can also do something like multiplication. And this does mean that tensors of compatible sizes will form a ring. Of course, that doesn’t say why they’re interesting.

Tensors are useful because they can describe spatial relationships efficiently. The word comes from the same Latin root as “tension”, a hint about how we can imagine it. A common use of tensors is in describing the stress in an object. Applying stress in different directions to an object often produces different effects. The classic example there is a newspaper. Rip it in one direction and you get a smooth, clean tear. Rip it perpendicularly and you get a raggedy mess. The stress tensor represents this: it gives some idea of how a force put on the paper will create a tear.

Tensors show up a lot in physics, and so in mathematical physics. Technically they show up everywhere, since vectors and even plain old numbers (scalars, in the lingo) are kinds of tensors, but that’s not what I mean. Tensors can describe efficiently things whose magnitude and direction changes based on where something is and where it’s looking. So they are a great tool to use if one wants to represent stress, or how well magnetic fields pass through objects, or how electrical fields are distorted by the objects they move in. And they describe space, as well: general relativity is built on tensors. The mathematics of a tensor allow one to describe how space is shaped, based on how to measure the distance between two points in space.

My own mathematical education happened to be pretty tensor-light. I never happened to have courses that forced me to get good with them, and I confess to feeling intimidated when a mathematical argument gets deep into tensor mathematics. Joseph C Kolecki, with NASA’s Glenn (Lewis) Research Center, published in 2002 a nice little booklet “An Introduction to Tensors for Students of Physics and Engineering”. This I think nicely bridges some of the gap between mathematical structures like vectors and matrices, that mathematics and physics majors know well, and the kinds of tensors that get called tensors and that can be intimidating.

Reading the Comics, October 1, 2016: Jumble Is Back Edition

Comic Strip Master Command sent another normal-style week for mathematics references. There’s not much that lets me get really chatty or gossippy about mathematics lore. That’s all right. The important thing is: we’ve got Jumble back.

Greg Cravens’s The Buckets for the 25th features a bit of parental nonsense-telling. The rather annoying noise inside a car’s cabin when there’s one window open is the sort of thing fluid mechanics ought to be able to study. I see references claiming this noise to be a Helmholz Resonance. This is a kind of oscillation in the air that comes from wind blowing across the lone hole in a solid object. Wikipedia says it’s even the same phenomenon producing an ocean-roar in a seashell held up to the ear. It’s named for Hermann von Helmholtz, who described it while studying sound and vortices. Helmholz is also renowned for making a clear statement of the conservation of energy — an idea many were working towards, mind — and in thermodynamics and electromagnetism and for that matter how the eye works. Also how fast nerves transmit signals. All that said, I’m not sure that all the unpleasant sound heard and pressure felt from a single opened car window is Helmholz Resonance. Real stuff is complicated and the full story is always more complicated than that. I wouldn’t go farther than saying that Helmholz Resonance is one thing to look at.

Michael Cavna’s Warped for the 25th uses two mathematics-cliché equations as “amazingly successful formulas”. One can quibble with whether Einstein should be counted under mathematics. Pythagoras, at least for the famous theorem named for him, nobody would argue. John Grisham, I don’t know, the joke seems dated to me but we are talking about the comics.

Tony Carrillos’ F Minus for the 28th uses arithmetic as as something no reasonable person can claim is incorrect. I haven’t read the comments, but I am slightly curious whether someone says something snarky about Common Core mathematics — or even the New Math for crying out loud — before or after someone finds a base other than ten that makes the symbols correct.

Cory Thomas’s college-set soap-opera strip Watch Your Head for the 28th name-drops Introduction to Functional Analysis. It won’t surprise you it’s a class nobody would take on impulse. It’s an upper-level undergraduate or a grad-student course, something only mathematics majors would find interesting. But it is very interesting. It’s the reward students have for making it through Real Analysis, the spirit-crushing course about why calculus works. Functional Analysis is about what we can do with functions. We can make them work like numbers. We can define addition and multiplication, we can measure their size, we can create sequences of them. We can treat functions almost as if they were numbers. And while we’re working on things more abstract and more exotic than the ordinary numbers Real Analysis depends on, somehow, Functional Analysis is easier than Real Analysis. It’s a wonder.

Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the 29th features a student getting worried about the order of arithmetic operations. I appreciate how kids get worried about the feelings of things like that. Although, truly, subtraction doesn’t go “last”; addition and subtraction have the same priority. They share the bottom of the pile, though. Multiplication and division similarly share a priority, above addition-and-subtraction. Many guides to the order of operations say to do addition-and-subtraction in order left to right, but that’s not so. Setting a left-to-right order is okay for deciding where to start. But you could do a string of additions or subtractions in any order and get the same answer, unless the expression is inconsistent.

Daniel Beyer’s Long Story Short for the 30th of September, 2016. I think Randolph Itch, 2am did this joke too but then had everyone retire to the bar chart.

Daniel Beyer’s Long Story Short for the 30th is a pie chart joke. There’s not a lot of mathematics to it, but I’m amused.

Justin Boyd’s Invisible Bread for the 30th has maybe my favorite dumb joke of the week. It’s just a kite that’s proven its knowledge of mathematics. I’m a little surprised the kite didn’t call out a funnier number, by which I mean 37, but perhaps … no, that doesn’t work, actually. Of course the kite would be comfortable with higher mathematics.

David L Hoyt and Jeff Knurek’s Jumble for the 1st of October, 2016. I don’t know that there even is a permanent link for this that would be any good.

And as promised, David L Hoyt and Jeff Knurek’s Jumble for the 1st of October mentions mathematics. That’s enough for me to include here.

A Summer 2015 Mathematics A To Z: tensor

Tensor.

The true but unenlightening answer first: a tensor is a regular, rectangular grid of numbers. The most common kind is a two-dimensional grid, so that it looks like a matrix, or like the times tables. It might be square, with as many rows as columns, or it might be rectangular.

It can also be one-dimensional, looking like a row or a column of numbers. Or it could be three-dimensional, rows and columns and whole levels of numbers. We don’t try to visualize that. It can be what we call zero-dimensional, in which case it just looks like a solitary number. It might be four- or more-dimensional, although I confess I’ve never heard of anyone who actually writes out such a thing. It’s just so hard to visualize.

You can add and subtract tensors if they’re of compatible sizes. You can also do something like multiplication. And this does mean that tensors of compatible sizes will form a ring. Of course, that doesn’t say why they’re interesting.

Tensors are useful because they can describe spatial relationships efficiently. The word comes from the same Latin root as “tension”, a hint about how we can imagine it. A common use of tensors is in describing the stress in an object. Applying stress in different directions to an object often produces different effects. The classic example there is a newspaper. Rip it in one direction and you get a smooth, clean tear. Rip it perpendicularly and you get a raggedy mess. The stress tensor represents this: it gives some idea of how a force put on the paper will create a tear.

Tensors show up a lot in physics, and so in mathematical physics. Technically they show up everywhere, since vectors and even plain old numbers (scalars, in the lingo) are kinds of tensors, but that’s not what I mean. Tensors can describe efficiently things whose magnitude and direction changes based on where something is and where it’s looking. So they are a great tool to use if one wants to represent stress, or how well magnetic fields pass through objects, or how electrical fields are distorted by the objects they move in. And they describe space, as well: general relativity is built on tensors. The mathematics of a tensor allow one to describe how space is shaped, based on how to measure the distance between two points in space.

My own mathematical education happened to be pretty tensor-light. I never happened to have courses that forced me to get good with them, and I confess to feeling intimidated when a mathematical argument gets deep into tensor mathematics. Joseph C Kolecki, with NASA’s Glenn (Lewis) Research Center, published in 2002 a nice little booklet “An Introduction to Tensors for Students of Physics and Engineering”. This I think nicely bridges some of the gap between mathematical structures like vectors and matrices, that mathematics and physics majors know well, and the kinds of tensors that get called tensors and that can be intimidating.