Principles of Optics: Electromagnetic Theory of Propagation, Interference and Diffraction of Light

by Emil Wolf and Max Born

Book Overview

Principles of Optics is one of the classic science books of the twentieth century, and probably the most influential book in optics published in the past forty years. This edition has been thoroughly revised and updated, with new material covering the CAT scan, interference with broad-band light and the so-called Rayleigh-Sommerfeld diffraction theory. This edition also details scattering from inhomogeneous media and presents an account of the principles...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0080264824
• ISBN13: 9780080264820
• Release Date: January 1981
• Publisher: Pergamon
• Length: 808 Pages
• Weight: 2.25 lbs.

Customer Reviews

The Bible

Amazing book. It's the bible of geometric optics. Have everything you might need. Needs a little previous knowledge, but which book doesn't?

A Classic in the Science of Optics

I read this book in the late sixties, when some of my fellow engineers built and tested an acoustic lens for a developmental company. Born & Wolf were well-acquainted with antenna aperture theory, and were among the first to write that the human eye could resolve 5X better than aperture theory would predict. This they credited to involuntary eye movements called flicks and saccades, which when combined with the brain's ability to do signal processing, was able to produce much better resolution than would have been predicted by the diameter of the retinal rods. In many ways the book gives testimony to God's wonderful gift of vision with color, depth, clarity, and order.

Good book

It is just a rare book on physical optics based on Maxwell equations. Rarely a book states the assumptions,the validity of the equations, the principles and how the equations arrived. Certainly, it is a great book for postgraduates and researchers in physical optics not so for undergraduate students who don't want to go through all the mathematics.

It has everything about classical wave optics!

This seventh edition of the famous classic standard book on optics is really neat! The notations, symbols became a little more modern than the previous editions. Also the shapes of the characters in the equations looks much more pretty so it helps reading, understanding. As most of you know, this has everything you need to study about, refer to classical wave optics. The only weak point of this book is the material covering geometrical optics. It's too abstract, mathematical and lacks modern treatment of optical designs, aberrations. But, regarding the wave optics, it's hard to find any flaws, downsides. Even though I am working on micro-photonic elements, I often need to refer to this book for some wave optics principles, knowledges. But this book alone does not cover the whole optics including optical design, photonics. If you want to have the best minimum combination of books covering the basics of the entire optics. I would recommend "Fundamentals of Photonics(Saleh)", "Modern Optical Engineering(Smith)" and this book.

A true classic in its field

It should be on the shelf of every serious optical engineer or scientist. I find myself referring to it at least monthly. What more needs to be said?