On Tue, Nov 6, 2018 at 3:55 PM Stefan van der Walt <stef...@berkeley.edu>
wrote:

> On Tue, 06 Nov 2018 12:11:13 -0800, Robert Kern wrote:
> > Popular, but quite misleading, in the same way that not every 2-dim array
> > is a matrix. As someone who works on tensor machine learning methods once
> > complained to me.
>
> Are you referring to vectors, structured arrays, or something else?
>

I was responding to this statement by Chuck:

> I think the current popular terminology is `tensors` for
`multidimensional arrays`.

Mostly popularized by Tensorflow. But the "tensors" that flow through
Tensorflow are mostly just multidimensional arrays and have no
tensor-algebraic meaning. Similarly, a 2-dim array (say, a grayscale
intensity image) doesn't necessarily have a matrix-algebraic
interpretation, either. A 640x480 grayscale image is not a linear
transformation from RR^640 to RR^480. It's just a collection of numbers
that are convenient to organize as a 2D grid.

This seems to be a pain point with some tensor methods ML researchers who
have to explain their work to an audience that seems to think that
Tensorflow must make their lives (and theses) easy. :-)

-- 
Robert Kern
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