A literature survey of low-rank tensor approximation techniques

During the last years, low-rank tensor approximation has been established as a new tool in scientific computing to address large-scale linear and multilinear algebra problems, which would be intractable by classical techniques. This survey attempts to give a literature overview of current developments in this area, with an emphasis on function-related tensors

Fast computation of the matrix exponential for a Toeplitz matrix

The computation of the matrix exponential is a ubiquitous operation in numerical mathematics, and for a general, unstructured $n\times n$ matrix it can be computed in $\mathcal{O}(n^3)$ operations. An interesting problem arises if the input matrix is a Toeplitz matrix, for example as the result of discretizing integral equations with a time invariant kernel. In this case it is not obvious how to take advantage of the Toeplitz structure, as the exponential of a Toeplitz matrix is, in general, not a Toeplitz matrix itself. The main contribution of this work are fast algorithms for the computation of the Toeplitz matrix exponential. The algorithms have provable quadratic complexity if the spectrum is real, or sectorial, or more generally, if the imaginary parts of the rightmost eigenvalues do not vary too much. They may be efficient even outside these spectral constraints. They are based on the scaling and squaring framework, and their analysis connects classical results from rational approximation theory to matrices of low displacement rank. As an example, the developed methods are applied to Merton's jump-diffusion model for option pricing

Some Preconditioning Techniques for Saddle Point Problems

Saddle point problems arise frequently in many applications in science and engineering, including constrained optimization, mixed finite element formulations of partial differential equations, circuit analysis, and so forth. Indeed the formulation of most problems with constraints gives rise to saddle point systems. This paper provides a concise overview of iterative approaches for the solution of such systems which are of particular importance in the context of large scale computation. In particular we describe some of the most useful preconditioning techniques for Krylov subspace solvers applied to saddle point problems, including block and constrained preconditioners.\ud \ud The work of Michele Benzi was supported in part by the National Science Foundation grant DMS-0511336