History
Lambert first considered the related Lambert's Transcendental Equation in 1758, which led to a paper by Leonhard Euler in 1783 that discussed the special case of wew. However the inverse of wew was first described by Pólya and Szegő in 1925. The Lambert W function was "re-discovered" every decade or so in specialized applications but its full importance was not realized until the 1990s. When it was reported that the Lambert W function provides an exact solution to the quantum-mechanical double-well Dirac delta function model for equal charges—a fundamental problem in physics—Corless and developers of the Maple Computer algebra system made a library search to find that this function was in fact ubiquitous to nature.
Read more about this topic: Lambert W Function
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that’s also a hypocrite!
There are only two great currents in the history of mankind: the baseness which makes conservatives and the envy which makes revolutionaries.”
—Edmond De Goncourt (1822–1896)
“If usually the “present age” is no very long time, still, at our pleasure, or in the service of some such unity of meaning as the history of civilization, or the study of geology, may suggest, we may conceive the present as extending over many centuries, or over a hundred thousand years.”
—Josiah Royce (1855–1916)