Large dense matrices are ubiquitous in scientific computing, arising from the discretization of integral operators associated with elliptic pdes, Schur complement methods, covariances in spatial statistics, kernel-based machine learning, and numerical optimization problems. Hierarchical matrices are an efficient way for storing the dense matrices of very large dimension that appear in these and related settings. They exploit the fact that the underlying matrices, while formally dense, are data sparse. They have a structure consisting of...