Abstract

Most undergraduate texts on optics suggest that a perfect lens would realize the Gaussian ray patterns for finite ray heights and angles. Maxwell, however, has already proven that this suggestion contradicts Fermat's principle. In this paper I show how students can be helped to develop a sense of the nature of real lenses by having them write short simulation programs that are valid for finite ray heights and angles. General-purpose programming languages, such as Pascal, C, and FORTRAN, can be used, as well as symbolic-mathematics software, such as Macsyma or Mathematica. These exercises are not time consuming; not more than a few dozen lines of code are needed. Several specific examples will be shown.

© 1990 Optical Society of America