The more I think about it the less inclined I am towards 'tensors are the one true way'. Since we can ultimately represent everything (conceptually) as matrices it may (perversely) make some sense to treat tensors as a special type of matrix, embuing them with certain properties. This way it keeps the development reasonably sane, works for most of the people all the time and could be extended later. I will ponder that....
on 15.08.2009 at 2:16 Edward Grace wrote : that is exactly my point but once things can change (again) only recently (10..20 years) math literature began to write formulas in matrix notation because people in their average become more educated since e.g. 20 years ago so one day we all can turn faces to tensors -- Pavel