In mathematics, a tensor is an algebraic object that describes a multilinear relationship between sets of algebraic objects associated with a vector space. Tensors may map between different objects such as vectors, scalars, and even other tensors. There are many types of tensors, including scalars and vectors (which are the simplest tensors), dual vectors, multilinear maps between vector spaces, and even some operations such as the dot product. Tensors are defined independent of any basis, although they are often referred to by their components in a basis related to a particular coordinate system; those components form an array, which can be thought of as a high-dimensional matrix.

Tensors have become important in physics because they provide a concise mathematical framework for formulating and solving physics problems in areas such as mechanics (stress, elasticity, quantum mechanics, fluid mechanics, moment of inertia, ...), electrodynamics (electromagnetic tensor, Maxwell tensor, permittivity, magnetic susceptibility, ...), and general relativity (stress–energy tensor, curvature tensor, ...). In applications, it is common to study situations in which a different tensor can occur at each point of an object; for example the stress within an object may vary from one location to another. This leads to the concept of a tensor field. In some areas, tensor fields are so ubiquitous that they are often simply called "tensors".

Tullio Levi-Civita and Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro popularised tensors in 1900 – continuing the earlier work of Bernhard Riemann, Elwin Bruno Christoffel, and others – as part of the absolute differential calculus. The concept enabled an alternative formulation of the intrinsic differential geometry of a manifold in the form of the Riemann curvature tensor.

Although seemingly different, the various approaches to defining tensors describe the same geometric concept using different language and at different levels of abstraction.

A tensor may be represented as a (potentially multidimensional) array. Just as a vector in an n-dimensional space is represented by a one-dimensional array with n components with respect to a given basis, any tensor with respect to a basis is represented by a multidimensional array. For example, a linear operator is represented in a basis as a two-dimensional square n × n array. The numbers in the multidimensional array are known as the components of the tensor. They are denoted by indices giving their position in the array, as subscripts and superscripts, following the symbolic name of the tensor. For example, the components of an order-2 tensor T could be denoted T_ij , where i and j are indices running from 1 to n, or also by T ⁱ
_j. Whether an index is displayed as a superscript or subscript depends on the transformation properties of the tensor, described below. Thus while T_ij and T ⁱ
_j can both be expressed as n-by-n matrices, and are numerically related via index juggling, the difference in their transformation laws indicates it would be improper to add them together.

The total number of indices (m) required to identify each component uniquely is equal to the dimension or the number of ways of an array, which is why a tensor is sometimes referred to as an m-dimensional array or an m-way array. The total number of indices is also called the order, degree or rank of a tensor, although the term "rank" generally has another meaning in the context of matrices and tensors.

Just as the components of a vector change when we change the basis of the vector space, the components of a tensor also change under such a transformation. Each type of tensor comes equipped with a transformation law that details how the components of the tensor respond to a change of basis. The components of a vector can respond in two distinct ways to a change of basis (see Covariance and contravariance of vectors), where the new basis vectors ${\displaystyle \mathbf {\hat {e}} _{i}}$ are expressed in terms of the old basis vectors ${\displaystyle \mathbf {e} _{j}}$ as,

Here R ^j_i are the entries of the change of basis matrix, and in the rightmost expression the summation sign was suppressed: this is the Einstein summation convention, which will be used throughout this article. The components vⁱ of a column vector v transform with the inverse of the matrix R,