Over the rainbow to algebraic analysis: Stokes’ phenomenon

In the 1850s, while trying to compute an integral from optics, George G. Stokes encountered a curious analytic phenomenon which many decades later turned out to be the key for a classification of linear complex differential equations. In this talk, we will first dive into the history of this discovery and its connection to the Riemann-Hilbert problem. At the end, we will see an explicit topological description of the Stokes phenomenon and some results about the behaviour under the Fourier transformation.