Overcoming the curse of dimensionality in the numerical approximation of Allen–Cahn partial differential equations via truncated full-history recursive multilevel Picard approximations

Abstract One of the most challenging problems in applied mathematics is the approximate solution of nonlinear partial differential equations (PDEs) in high dimensions. Standard deterministic approximation methods like finite differences or finite elements suffer from the curse of dimensionality in the sense that the computational effort grows exponentially in the dimension. In this work we overcome this difficulty in the case of reaction–diffusion type PDEs with a locally Lipschitz continuous coervice nonlinearity (such as Allen–Cahn PDEs) by introducing and analyzing truncated variants of the recently introduced full-history recursive multilevel Picard approximation schemes.