On the fast matrix multiplication in the boundary element method by panel clustering (Q1100846)

The boundary element method leads to a system of linear equations with a full matrix, while the finite element method yields sparse matrices. This fact seems to require much computational work for the definition of the matrix, for the solution of the system, and, in particular, for the matrix-vector multiplication, which always occurs as an elementary operation. In this paper a method for the approximate matrix-vector multiplication is described which requires much less arithmetical work. In addition, the storage requirements are strongly reduced.