  There has been a large increase in the amount of work on hierarchical
low-rank approximation methods, where the interest is shared by multiple
communities that previously did not intersect. This objective of this article
is two-fold; to provide a thorough review of the recent advancements in this
field from both analytical and algebraic perspectives, and to present a
comparative benchmark of two highly optimized implementations of contrasting
methods for some simple yet representative test cases. We categorize the recent
advances in this field from the perspective of compute-memory tradeoff, which
has not been considered in much detail in this area. Benchmark tests reveal
that there is a large difference in the memory consumption and performance
between the different methods.

Numerical Analysis