[tommiegannert]

Those safety margin and tolerance calculations are based on existing models (what I called "tables"), combined to form a new whole. What I would call composition.

Whether math is being applied doesn't seem like an important distinction to whether something is composition or not. I reason about computational complexity when I build distributed systems, just like civil engineers reason about tolerances. But I'm still assuming a best-of-class sorting algorithm and a reduction of some domain problem into a shortest-path algorithm. The same they do about I-beams and spans.