Overcoming the Curse of Dimensionality in the Numerical Approximation of Parabolic Partial Differential Equations with Gradient-Dependent Nonlinearities

Partial differential equations (PDEs) are a fundamental tool in the modeling of many real-world phenomena. In a number of such real-world phenomena the PDEs under consideration contain gradient-dependent nonlinearities and are high-dimensional. Such high-dimensional nonlinear PDEs can in nearly all cases not be solved explicitly, and it is one of the most challenging tasks in applied mathematics to solve high-dimensional nonlinear PDEs approximately. It is especially very challenging to design approximation algorithms for nonlinear PDEs for which one can rigorously prove that they do overcome the so-called curse of dimensionality in the sense that the number of computational operations of the approximation algorithm needed to achieve an approximation precision of size ε>0\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\varepsilon }> 0$$\end{document} grows at most polynomially in both the PDE dimension d∈N\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$d \in \mathbb {N}$$\end{document} and the reciprocal of the prescribed approximation accuracy ε\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\varepsilon }$$\end{document}. In particular, to the best of our knowledge there exists no approximation algorithm in the scientific literature which has been proven to overcome the curse of dimensionality in the case of a class of nonlinear PDEs with general time horizons and gradient-dependent nonlinearities. It is the key contribution of this article to overcome this difficulty. More specifically, it is the key contribution of this article (i) to propose a new full-history recursive multilevel Picard approximation algorithm for high-dimensional nonlinear heat equations with general time horizons and gradient-dependent nonlinearities and (ii) to rigorously prove that this full-history recursive multilevel Picard approximation algorithm does indeed overcome the curse of dimensionality in the case of such nonlinear heat equations with gradient-dependent nonlinearities.