(Continued from Walpurgisnacht 2012)
Wikipedia article on functional decomposition—
"Outside of purely mathematical considerations,
perhaps the greatest value of functional decomposition
is the insight it provides into the structure of the world."
Certainly this is true for the sort of decomposition
known as harmonic analysis .
It is not, however, true of my own decomposition theorem,
which deals only with structures made up of at most four
different sorts of elementary parts.
But my own approach has at least some poetic value.
See the four elements of the Greeks in (for instance)
Eliot's Four Quartets and in Auden's For the Time Being .