[wohlergehen]

In the case of physics, the name tensor is well deserved and used with purpose---the object are mathematically speaking tensors (and where called tensors before computers existed). Their naming is unrelated to their physical representation in memory, even though they end up being arrays. The same is true for various engineering disciplines.

For ML, it just turns out that they can talk about their objects and the corresponding operations also mathematically as tensors.

[kgwgk]

Except that none of these operations are related to the properties that make a tensor a tensor, as far as I know. People were already operating happily on multidimensional arrays before.

[21]

"multidimensional array" doesn't quite roll off the tongue

[Eliezer]

They could have just been called arrays.