  The graph Laplacian is a standard tool in data science, machine learning, and
image processing. The corresponding matrix inherits the complex structure of
the underlying network and is in certain applications densely populated. This
makes computations, in particular matrix-vector products, with the graph
Laplacian a hard task. A typical application is the computation of a number of
its eigenvalues and eigenvectors. Standard methods become infeasible as the
number of nodes in the graph is too large. We propose the use of the fast
summation based on the nonequispaced fast Fourier transform (NFFT) to perform
the dense matrix-vector product with the graph Laplacian fast without ever
forming the whole matrix. The enormous flexibility of the NFFT algorithm allows
us to embed the accelerated multiplication into Lanczos-based eigenvalues
routines or iterative linear system solvers and even consider other than the
standard Gaussian kernels. We illustrate the feasibility of our approach on a
number of test problems from image segmentation to semi-supervised learning
based on graph-based PDEs. In particular, we compare our approach with the
Nystr\"om method. Moreover, we present and test an enhanced, hybrid version of
the Nystr\"om method, which internally uses the NFFT.
