I will give an overview of how oscillatory integrals arise in analytic number theory, especially the theory of L-functions and automorphic forms. Usually the integrals we are faced with are multiple-yet-low dimensional, so that they are approachable by repeated one-dimensional stationary phase estimates.
We will discuss some recent multi-scale method on incidence estimate for tubes and its application to oscillatory integrals. The multi-scale method was developed by Keleti-Shmerkin, Orponen, Shmerkin, etc.