You'd hate particle physics then. "Spin" and "action" and so on are terrible names, but scientists live with them, because convention.
Convention dominates most of what we do. I'm not sure there's a good way around this. Most conventions suck, but they were established back before there was a clear idea of what the best long-term convention should be.
At least in physics you can understand how the terms came about historically, where at some point they made sense. But “tensor” here, as note in sibling comments, seems to have been chosen primarily for marketing reasons.
It comes from the maths, where tensors are generalisations of matrices/vectors. They got cribbed, because the ML stuff directly used a bunch of the underlying maths. It’s a novel term, it sounds cool, not surprised it also then got promoted up into a marketing term.
> tensors are generalisations of matrices/vectors.
Is that what they are though? Because that really is not my understanding. Tensors are mappings which not all matrices and vectors are. Maybe the matrices in ML layers are all mappings, but a matrix in general is not, not is a vector always a mapping. So tensors aren’t generalizations of matrices and vectors.
> Tensors are mappings which not all matrices and vectors are.
A tensor in Physics is an object that follows some rules when changing reference frame. Their matrix representation is just one way of writing them. It’s the same with vectors: a list with their components is a representation of a vector, not the vector itself. We can think about it that way: the velocity of an object does not depend on the reference frame. Changing the axes does not make the object change its trajectory, but it does change the numerical values of the components of the velocity vector.
> So tensors aren’t generalizations of matrices and vectors.
Indeed. Tensors in ML have pretty much nothing to do with tensors in Maths or Physics. It is very unfortunate that they settled on the same name just because it sounds cool and sciency.
Convention dominates most of what we do. I'm not sure there's a good way around this. Most conventions suck, but they were established back before there was a clear idea of what the best long-term convention should be.