Fast Multipole Method

- Natural & Formal Sciences -
Mathematics & Logic Dictionary
Definition
An algorithmic framework that accelerates the evaluation of long-range pairwise interactions (e.g., Coulomb or gravitational potentials) by clustering sources, representing their far-field effect with multipole expansions, translating these expansions between clusters, and evaluating local expansions near targets to reduce the complexity from O(N^2) to near-linear or N log N in practice.