Hsien-Kuei Hwang (Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan)

In this talk, I will first review existing asymptotic approximations in the literature for the Stirling partition numbers (or Stirling numbers of the second kind), the list of references being by far the most complete one. Then I will present a general, systematic, elementary approach to generate ten different asymptotic expansions whose uniformity covers particularly the central range (with most mass of the distribution lies). These expansions represent the first such ones in the literature that are rigorously justified.

This talk is based on joint work with Chong-Yi Li and Vytas Zacharovas.