I'm studying Bézier surfaces and they are a special case of a more general construction, tensor product surfaces. I'd really like to know why this name. I am familiar only with the abstract (algebraic) definition of tensor product between two vector spaces using the universal property.
For reference a Bézier surface is a function $S(u,v)=\sum\limits_{i=0}^{n}\sum\limits_{j=0}^{m}B_{i,n}(u)B_{j,m}(v)\mathbf{P}_{i,j}$ where $\mathbf{P}_{i,j} \in \mathbb{R}^3$ and $B_{h,k}(x)$ is the $h$-th Bernstein basis polynomial of degree $k$.