Product Description
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 of diffraction tomography to which Emil Wolf has made a basic contribution. Several new appendices are also included. This new edition will be invaluable to advanced undergraduates, graduate students and researchers working in most areas of optics.

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 10 reviews)

Need modernising

Yes - all classical (linear) optical concepts are in here, and yes, it's the 'bible', but it's very dated in its content, style and references, generally, and not very practical to use.

I wish Hecht - or someone like him - would re-write this classic as a more advanced version of his book.
July 10, 2007

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?
July 05, 2007

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.
September 25, 2004

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.
March 14, 2003

A Classic

This book is a classic with all problems associated. Half of the reference quoted have been written before the WWII. Very useful if you like to quote original papers. This book cover most topics of the classical optics but hardy cover modern topics.

However, it is hard to read and use a weird notation. Certainly not useful for rapid referencing. Like the bible, use it only when you have serious problem to deal with.
December 12, 2002

SIMILAR PRODUCTS

Introduction to Fourier Optics
by Joseph W. Goodman

Optics (4th Edition)
by Eugene Hecht

Introduction to Modern Optics
by Grant R. Fowles

Classical Electrodynamics Third Edition
by John David Jackson

Fundamentals of Photonics (Wiley Series in Pure and Applied Optics)
by Bahaa E. A. Saleh, Malvin Carl Teich