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
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