On the Numerical Rank of the Off-Diagonal Blocks of Schur Complements of Discretized Elliptic PDEs

It is shown that the numerical rank of the off-diagonal blocks of certain Schur complements of matrices that arise from the finite-difference discretization of constant coefficient, elliptic PDEs in two spatial dimensions is bounded by a constant independent of the grid size. Moreover, in three-dimensional problems the Schur complements are shown to have off-diagonal blocks whose numerical rank is a slowly growing function.