is used with integrals in the complex plane, whereas Laplace's method is used with real integrals.

The integral to be estimated is often of the form
:where C is a contour, and ? is large. One version of the method of steepest descent deforms the contour of integration C into a new path integration C´ so that the following conditions hold:
# C´ passes through one or more zeros of the derivative g´(z),
# the imaginary part of g(z) is constant on C´.

The method of steepest descent was first published by , who used

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