About me

I'm back in my hometown of Seattle, developing ridiculously fast and accurate numerical algorithms for Rhinoceros 3D's CAD kernel at Robert McNeel & Associates.

Previously I was a Research Scientist at Coreform (immersed isogeometric analysis) and a Courant Instructor at NYU with Leslie Greengard and Mike O'Neil, affiliated with the Flatiron Institute's Center for Computational Mathematics. I earned my PhD in computer science at Maryland, advised by Masha Cameron and Ramani Duraiswami.

Software

  • butterflythe butterfly factorization, in C99 with Python bindings
  • jmmthe jet marching method for the eikonal equation (C99/Python)
  • python-fluxfast BEM for thermal & illumination modeling in planetary science
  • python-embreethin Embree 3 wrapper with easy numpy interop
  • olimordered line integral method for the eikonal equation, in C++
  • nufft1D nonuniform FFT via the fast multipole method (C++)

Open-source work at McNeel is on GitHub; proprietary work at Coreform.

Papers

Paul G. Beckman, Samuel F. Potter, Michael O'Neil
A butterfly-accelerated manifold harmonic transform
Haiyang Wang, Fredrik Fryklund, Samuel Potter, Leslie Greengard
Scattering theory for Stokes flow in complex branched structures
Samuel F Potter
Fast construction of efficient cut cell quadratures
Fredrik Fryklund, Leslie Greengard, Shidong Jiang, Samuel Potter
A lightweight, geometrically flexible fast algorithm for the evaluation of layer and volume potentials
Journal of Computational Physics · 2025
Samuel F Potter, Monte Hoover, Dmitry Zotkin, Ramani Duraiswami
Computing acoustic onsets via an eikonal solver
IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics · 2023
Samuel F Potter, Stefano Bertone, Norbert Schörghofer, Erwan Mazarico
Fast hierarchical low-rank view factor matrices for thermal irradiance on planetary surfaces
Journal of Computational Physics: X · 2023
Samuel F Potter, Maria K Cameron, Ramani Duraiswami
Numerical geometric acoustics: an eikonal-based approach for modeling sound propagation in 3D environments
Journal of Computational Physics · 2023
Samuel F Potter, Maria K Cameron
Jet marching methods for solving the eikonal equation
Journal on Scientific Computing · SIAM · 2021
Samuel F Potter, Maria K Cameron
Ordered line integral methods for solving the eikonal equation
Journal of Scientific Computing · Springer · 2019
Shuo Yang, Samuel F Potter, Maria K Cameron
Computing the quasipotential for nongradient SDEs in 3D
Journal of Computational Physics · Elsevier · 2019
Samuel F Potter, Ramani Duraiswami
Fast and stable Pascal matrix algorithms
Technical report · 2017
Samuel F Potter, Nail A Gumerov, Ramani Duraiswami
Fast interpolation of bandlimited functions
ICASSP · IEEE · 2017

Talks

  • 2025Fast cut cell quadratures and robust contouring algorithms · Seminar in Applied Mathematics, University of Washington
  • Fast cut cell quadratures and robust contouring algorithms · Seminar, Geometric Computing Lab, NYU (D. Panozzo)
  • Fast construction of efficient cut cell quadratures · SIAM Annual Meeting
  • 2024Butterfly-accelerated Gaussian random fields on manifolds · ALGORITMY 2024
  • Jet marching on unstructured meshes: algorithms and applications · ALGORITMY 2024
  • 2023Jet marching methods for numerical geometric acoustics · ICIAM 2023
  • Butterfly-accelerated multiple scattering in two dimensions · ICOSAHOM 2023
  • Recent progress on the butterfly factorization · University of Maryland
  • Butterfly-accelerated manifold harmonic transforms · SIAM CSE 2023
  • Butterfly-accelerated manifold harmonic transforms · Western Washington University · job talk
  • 2022Butterfly-accelerated manifold harmonic transforms · Numerical Analysis Day, NYU
  • Fast algorithm for terrain irradiance using compressed view factor matrices · CMG 2022
  • Jet marching methods for numerical geometric acoustics · Courant Instructor Day, NYU
  • 2021Jet marching methods for numerical geometric acoustics · NASC Seminar, NYU
  • Numerical geometric acoustics · Dissertation defense, University of Maryland
  • Fast algorithms and precomputation in room acoustics and planetary science · Flatiron Institute · job talk
  • Jet marching methods for numerical geometric acoustics · Joint Mathematics Meetings
  • 2020Jet marching methods for solving the eikonal equation · Sayas Numerics Day

Teaching

  • NYU · Spring 2023Numerical Analysis
  • NYU · Fall 2022Linear and Nonlinear Optimization
  • NYU · Spring 2022Numerical Analysis
  • NYU · Fall 2021Calculus 3