[Numpy-discussion] Programmatically contracting multiple tensors

[Michael Lamparski]

Greetings,

I have something in my code where I can receive an array M of unknown
dimensionality and a list of "labels" for each axis.  E.g. perhaps I might
get an array of shape (2, 47, 3, 47, 3) with labels ['spin', 'atom',
'coord', 'atom', 'coord'].

For every axis that is labeled "coord", I want to multiply in some rotation
matrix R.  So, for the above example, this could be done with the following
handwritten line:

return np.einsum('Cc,Ee,abcde->abCdE', R, R, M)

But since I want to do this programmatically, I find myself in the awkward
situation of having to construct this string (and e.g. having to
arbitrarily limit the number of axes to 26 or something like that).  Is
there a more idiomatic way to do this that would let me supply integer
labels for summation indices?  Or should I just bite the bullet and start
generating strings?

---
Michael
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