May 18 – 22, 2026
Virginia Tech
America/New_York timezone

Computing Functions of Rank-structured or Telescopic Matrices.

May 21, 2026, 11:00 AM
25m
McBryde Hall 129 (Virginia Tech)

McBryde Hall 129

Virginia Tech

Minisymposium Talk Polynomials, Krylov Methods and Applications Polynomials, Krylov Methods and Applications

Speaker

Andrea Baleani (Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa)

Description

Appearing in a wide variety of applications, often in the context of discretized (fractional) differential and integral operators, Hierarchically Semiseparable (HSS) matrices have a number of attractive properties facilitating the development of fast algorithms [6,4].

For HSS matrices, the rank-structure is numerically preserved if $f(z)$ is well-approximated by a rational function. The underlying reason for this is that if $A$ is HSS, $A^{-1}$ shares the same structure [5]. Recently, Casulli, Kressner and Robol proposed an algorithm for computing matrix functions $f(A)$ where $A$ is HSS and symmetric [3]. This result is based on the equivalence between HSS structure and the existence of telescopic decompositions
$$A=A^{(L)}= D^{(L)}+U^{(L)}A^{(L-1)}{V^{(L)}}^T.$$ In our work we extend the procedure to general (non-symmetric) HSS matrices. The algorithm works recursively, viewing the telescopic decomposition as a sequence of low-rank updates to block-diagonal matrices $D^{(L-i)}$ for $i = 0,\dots,L$. At each step, after some careful permutation of the diagonal blocks, we employ Block Rational Krylov methods [1] to approximate the effect of the low-rank update while keeping the size of the matrices involved small. Moreover, this technique allows the efficient computation of $f(T)$ where $T$ is a Toeplitz. Up to an FFT, the off-diagonal blocks of a Toeplitz matrix satisfy a displacement equation. The low-rank of the right-hand side is linked to fast singular value decay, which, in turn, implies that $\Omega T\Omega^*$ can be well-approximated by an HSS matrix [2].

[1] B. Beckermann et al., SIAM J. Numer. Anal., 59(3), 2021.
[2] B. Beckermann et al., Numerical Algorithms 100(4), 2025.
[3] A. A. Casulli et al., SIAM J. Matrix Anal. Appl., 45(4), 2024.
[4] S. Chandrasekaran et al., SIAM J. Matrix Anal. Appl., 27(02), 2005.
[5] A. Cortinovis et al., SIAM J. Matrix Anal. Appl., 43(1), 2022.
[6] W. Hackbusch, Hierarchical Matrices: Algorithms and Analysis, 49, 2015.

Authors

Andrea Baleani (Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa) Mr Leonardo Robol (University of Pisa) Mr Stefano Massei (University of Pisa)

Presentation materials