On diakoptics: Tearing an arbitrary system

Kron's techniques of tearing and if-partitioning are discussed as they apply to large linear systems of an arbitrary nature and tearing is discarded as inefficient. It is shown that decreasing the size of the sub-units in if-partitioning increases its efficiency; carried to the limit, this reduction results in a Gaussian elimination scheme. Finally, the optimum application of if-partitioning is presented as a linear programming problem.