Finite Elephant Ceramic Ornament

Like Hannibal crossing the Alps, the arrival of finite elements on the scene back in the 60s was a watershed event in the history of engineering. Never again would we resort to spherical cows or other questionable approximations of Nature and Nature's god heretofore required to make the mathematics tractable. Pick a shape function, tessellate the geometry of interest, apply some variational mojo, and bam! You got 99 problems but a PDE ain't one of them. From its humble origins analysing airframe components and widget elbows, FEM has since found application in every discipline that toils beneath the multicolored hobnail boots of partial differential equations: E&M, heat transfer, neutron flux, probability diffusions. Like the Lady of the Lake delivering Arthur Excalibur to rid the world of evil, forever altering our basis for government. Finite elements:is there anything they can't do? Tessellated happy elephant. Also: wordplay. Customizable.