Better Late Than Never: Filling a Void in the History of Fast Matrix Multiplication and Tensor Decompositions

Multilinear and tensor decompositions are a popular tool in linear and multilinear algebra and have a wide range of important applications to modern computing. Our paper of 1972 presented the first nontrivial application of such decompositions to fundamental matrix computations and was also a landmark in the history of the acceleration of matrix multiplication. Published in 1972 in Russian, it has never been translated into English. It has been very rarely cited in the Western literature on matrix multiplication and never in the works on multilinear and tensor decompositions. This motivates us to present its translation into English, together with our brief comments on its impact on the two fields. 2000 Math. Subject Classification: 15A69, 01A60, 15-03