  In this article, we consider fast direct solvers for nonlocal operators. The
pivotal idea is to combine a wavelet representation of the system matrix,
yielding a quasi-sparse matrix, with the nested dissection ordering scheme. The
latter drastically reduces the fill-in during the factorization of the system
matrix by means of a Cholesky decomposition or an LU decomposition,
respectively. This way, we end up with the exact inverse of the compressed
system matrix with only a moderate increase of the number of nonzero entries in
the matrix.
  To illustrate the efficacy of the approach, we conduct numerical experiments
for different highly relevant applications of nonlocal operators: We consider
(i) the direct solution of boundary integral equations in three spatial
dimensions, issuing from the polarizable continuum model, (ii) a parabolic
problem for the fractional Laplacian in integral form and (iii) the fast
simulation of Gaussian random fields.
