Talk:Stokes phenomenon

I put a citation to Witten for the Airy function explanation. It is a full section of the paper, but I would prefer to find a just as good explanation but in a textbook. AHusain (talk) 04:13, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

I note that this is also in the scope of WP Mathematics; I will make some minor edits now.

Rob.Corless (talk) 01:17, 6 March 2022 (UTC)

I found the article rather helpful, in fact. The pointer to the SIAM Review paper was especially good---that paper uses the Airy function example in a similar way to the Airy function example here, but in my opinion an even clearer way. Altering the current article to be even more like the paper is likely not needed, however.

The Stokes phenomenon is typically encountered in an upper-year undergraduate applied math course (or possibly in a fluid mechanics course at a similar level). Optics, maybe---although I would expect people just to quote the asymptotics of the Airy function there. It's not reasonable, I think, to make the wikipedia article intelligible to people who aren't prepared to accept approximation of one function by another, or to work in the complex plane (isn't that what textbooks are for?); but if one is ready for the idea of approximation, and is comfortable with the idea of multivalued functions needing branch cuts (I have explicitly added this notion to that example, as is done in the SIREV paper), then I think the article is pretty clear already. Rob.Corless (talk) 01:46, 6 March 2022 (UTC)