with sections separated by stepwise discontinuities
from Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon,
or Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet.
As commissioner of lighthouses in France
he designed a series of different-size lenses
and was the first to build these large-aperture
and short-focal-length lenses for lighthouses.
The principles
The basic principles survive
and are reapplied
in unanticipated
contexts.
Augustin-Jean Fresnel created
an object of beauty
for which each lens facet,
each mount, each screw
was made by hand to amaze
for hundreds of years.
These laws about light waves were not obvious;
Fresnel and Arago were brilliant experimenters
and made clever prisms and filters
to superimpose parallel and orthogonally polarized rays of light.
Fresnel is also famous for a prism, the Fresnel rhomb,
that converts linearly polarized light to circularly polarized light.
These laws about light waves were not obvious; Fresnel and Arago were brilliant experimenters and made clever prisms and filters to superimpose parallel and orthogonally polarized rays of light. Fresnel is also famous for a prism, the Fresnel rhomb, that converts linearly polarized light to circularly polarized light.
See also in The book of science:
Readings on wikipedia:
Other readings: