Introduction

Abstract

One characteristic that defines us, human beings, is the curiosity of the unknown. Since our birth, we have been trying to use any methods that human brains can comprehend to explore the nature: to mimic, to understand, and to utilize in a controlled and repeatable way. One of the most ancient means lies in the nature herself, experiments, leading to tremendous achievements from the creation of fire to the scissors of genes. Then comes mathematics, a new world we made by numbers and symbols, where the nature is reproduced by laws and theorems in an extremely simple, beautiful, and unprecedentedly accurate manner. With the explosive development of digital sciences, computer was created. It provided us the third way to investigate the nature, a digital world whose laws can be ruled by ourselves with codes and algorithms to numerically mimic the real universe. In this chapter, we briefly review the history of tensor network algorithms and the related progresses made recently. The organization of our lecture notes is also presented.