ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Inductive tensor product

Okay, so let's imagine you have two things: a big box and a little box. In the big box, there are lots of toys - like balls, blocks, and stuffed animals. In the little box, there are just a few toys - maybe a toy car and a doll.

Now, let's say you want to combine the toys from these two boxes into one new box. You could just dump everything in together, but then it would be really hard to sort them out and play with them later. So instead, you want to create a system for putting the toys in the new box in a way that makes sense.

This is kind of like what happens when we talk about the inductive tensor product. Instead of toys, we're talking about mathematical structures called vectors. These vectors can be big (like the toys in the big box) or little (like the toys in the little box).

The inductive tensor product is a way of combining these vectors so that they work together. Just like you wouldn't want to mix up all the toys in the big and little boxes, mathematicians also want to keep the big vectors and little vectors separate. This is done by using a bunch of rules that tell us how to multiply the vectors together.

The result of multiplying these vectors together is a new vector that has aspects of both the big and little vectors. This new vector helps us do a bunch of cool things in math, like understanding how different physical systems work together or solving complicated equations.

So in short, the inductive tensor product is a way of combining big and little mathematical structures (called vectors) into a new structure that has properties of both. Think of it like combining toys from different boxes - it's easier to sort and play with them if you put them together in a sensible way.