Hierarchical Matrices: Algorithms and Analysis

The numerical treatment of fully populated large-scale matrices is usually rather costly. However, the technique of hierarchical matrices makes it possible to store matrices and to perform matrix operations approximately with almost linear cost and a controllable degree of approximation error. For important classes of matrices, the computational cost increases only logarithmically with the approximation error. The operations provided include the matrix inversion and LU decomposition.

Since large-scale linear algebra problems are standard in scientific computing, the subject of hierarchical matrices is of interest to scientists in computational mathematics, physics, chemistry and engineering.