$\mathcal O(n)$ working precision inverses for symmetric tridiagonal Toeplitz matrices with $\mathcal O(1)$ floating point calculations

Abstract

A well known numerical task is the inversion of large symmetric tridiagonal Toeplitz matrices, i.e., matrices whose entries equal a on the diagonal and b on the extra diagonals ($a, b\in \mathbb R$). The inverses of such matrices are dense and there exist well known explicit formulas by which they can be calculated in $\mathcal O(n^2)$. In this note we present a simplification of the problem that has proven to be rather useful in everyday practice: If $\vert a\vert > 2\vert b\vert$, that is, if the matrix is strictly diagonally dominant, its inverse is a band matrix to working precision and the bandwidth is independent of n for sufficiently large n. Employing this observation, we construct a linear time algorithm for an explicit tridiagonal inversion that only uses $\mathcal O(1)$ floating point operations. On the basis of this simplified inversion algorithm we outline the cornerstones for an efficient parallelizable approximative equation solver.