>>13944458It really depends on the background of the specific public...
But I would probably say something like... the behavior of some things in physics can be shown with just a number, a "how much": how hot is this potato, how dense is that metal". There is some other family of things that requires not only a "how strong/much?" But also some notion of "in which direction", like wind has a strength but also a direction, or like magnets repel each other differently depending on what direction they're facing.
And so it happens that there is some other family of things that not only need one but two different notions of direction, like for example if you want to talk about "how strong is the wind?" (notion of how much) plus "according to which of my body's sides?(left, right, front, back?)"(first notion of direction) but also need to know "is the wind hitting me in a frontal direction like a hair blower or is it more like it's flowing around me as I were on a river.
Now, for each of these families of things, there is some math that can deal with describing them, like being able to add the weights of things to know the total weight, or knowing how does the strength and direction of a wind change as I'm on the ground or climbing a 5g antena.
And that last family of things is no different in that sense, in fact there is a whole theory of mathematics that can be used to precisely describe operations between this weird "numbers with a first direction but also another direction" (what does it mean to add these things? And multiply?). These things that can describe the members of that last family, are called "tensors", and the whole theory of mathematics that defines what are those operations between them, is called tensors analysis
Thanks for coming to my tedtalk kek
