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In multilinear algebra, a tensor contraction is an operation on a tensor that arises from the canonical pairing of a vector space and its dual.In components, it is expressed as a sum of products of scalar components of the tensor(s) caused by applying the summation convention to a pair of dummy indices that are bound to each other in an expression.
The tensors are classified according to their type (n, m), where n is the number of contravariant indices, m is the number of covariant indices, and n + m gives the total order of the tensor. For example, a bilinear form is the same thing as a (0, 2) -tensor; an inner product is an example of a (0, 2) -tensor, but not all (0, 2) -tensors are ...
For example, doing rotations over axis does not affect at all the properties of tensors, if a transformation law is followed. Tensors are of importance in pure and applied mathematics, physics and engineering.
A dyadic tensor T is an order-2 tensor formed by the tensor product ⊗ of two Cartesian vectors a and b, written T = a ⊗ b.Analogous to vectors, it can be written as a linear combination of the tensor basis e x ⊗ e x ≡ e xx, e x ⊗ e y ≡ e xy, ..., e z ⊗ e z ≡ e zz (the right-hand side of each identity is only an abbreviation, nothing more):
It is common convention to use greek indices when writing expressions involving tensors in Minkowski space, while Latin indices are reserved for Euclidean space. Well-formulated expressions are constrained by the rules of Einstein summation : any index may appear at most twice and furthermore a raised index must contract with a lowered index.
The tensor product of two vector spaces is a vector space that is defined up to an isomorphism.There are several equivalent ways to define it. Most consist of defining explicitly a vector space that is called a tensor product, and, generally, the equivalence proof results almost immediately from the basic properties of the vector spaces that are so defined.
Similarly, every second rank tensor (such as the stress and the strain tensors) has three independent invariant quantities associated with it. One set of such invariants are the principal stresses of the stress tensor, which are just the eigenvalues of the stress tensor. Their direction vectors are the principal directions or eigenvectors.
While the "position"-4-vectors of the events change between different inertial frames, their spacetime distance remains invariant under the corresponding Lorentz transformation. Other examples of Lorentz scalars are the "length" of 4-velocities (see below), or the Ricci curvature in a point in spacetime from general relativity , which is a ...