One reason at the time was a new area of application, homological algebra. The development of algebraic topology during the 1940s gave additional incentive for the development of a purely algebraic treatment of the tensor product. The computation of the homology groups of the product of two topological spaces involves the tensor product; but only in the simplest cases, such as a torus, is it directly calculated in that fashion (see Künneth theorem). The topological phenomena were subtle enough to need better foundational concepts; technically speaking, the Tor functors had to be defined.