The story
Named from the de Bruijn sequence, which can be considered a special case for n=1 (one dimension). It is a torus because the edges are considered to wrap around for the purpose of finding matrices.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
de Bruijn torus
Today it means: An array of symbols from an alphabet (often just 0 and 1) that contains every m-by-n matrix exactly once. Full definition →