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I don't find it very accessible, myself - but I'm not a physicist, so the materials using or about that notation aren't aimed at me.

The only tensor notation I've been happy with is that used in J (http://www.jsoftware.com), which is simple, flexible, and concise.

There's also some nice-enough modern notation used in this excellent review: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~christos/courses/826-resources/PAPERS...



The notation is very simple: you write tensor expressions with indices, and repeated indices are implicitly summed over. For example, matrix multiply:

   A_ij = B_ik C_kj
Differentiating this with respect to variable l:

   ∂_l A_ij = ∂_l (B_ik C_kj) = (∂_l B_ik) C_kj + B_ik (∂_l C_kj)
By writing out indices you can just use the rules for scalar derivatives.


Oh in that case I'm just confused - that's what I know as Einstein notation. Modern physics papers seemed to use much more complex notation, but I probably just misunderstood.

If we're talking about Einstein notation, then I'm a fan - `np.einsum()` is often a great way to create fast tensor computations with minimal code.




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