Fast BEM computations with the adaptive multilevel fast multipole method

Since the storage requirements of the BEM are proportional to N/sup 2/, only relative small problems can be solved on a PC or a workstation. In this paper we present an adaptive multilevel fast multipole method for the solution of electrostatic problems with the BEM. We will show, that in practice the storage requirements and the computational costs are approximately proportional to N and therefore even large three dimensional problems can be solved on a relative small computer.