Systematic Approach to the Teaching of Lens Theory

Abstract

A general description of optical instruments is presented, which can be used to treat geometrical optics, Fourier optics, and the wave theory in a unified manner. It is shown that a joint treatment of these various branches of optics clarifies many results that quite often remain intuitively obscure to the student; e.g., the Legendre transformations in eikonal theory attain an immediate significance in the context of the wave theory. Students of a course along these lines must have a moderate knowledge of Fourier integrals. In the final section it is shown that diffraction theory can be described in terms of a “sum over all rays” concept.