Wigner Not the ‘W’ in WKB
DOI: 10.1063/1.4797249
Stevenson replies: I thank John Knox and several others for pointing out my incorrect attribution of the W in WKB. The approximation predates their quantum mechanical application and was indeed to be found in the work of Harold Jeffreys. An interesting website, www.du.edu/~jcalvert/phys/wkb.htm , gives more historical details. The essential features of the so-called WKB or WKBJ approximation were known even earlier 1 but Lord Rayleigh already has too many things named after him.
References
1. Lord Rayleigh, Proc. R. Soc. London, series A, 86(586), 207 (1912), eq. 67 https://doi.org/10.1098/rspa.1912.0014 .
More about the authors
David Stevenson, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, US .
