A늌W

2011 Seminar

20110514(Stanford, CA)

                 Optical Design and The Black Art of Quadratures

Abstract:

Optical design is often thought of as a practiced with experience, instinct, and educated guesswork. For the last 20 years, Gaussian Quadrature has lent a mathematical approach to optical design. As applied to optical design, Gaussian Quadrature is a method for efficient lens evaluation/optimization by appropriate sampling of rays within the pupil, field points within the field, and wavelengths within a wavelength range. Gaussian Quadrature on the circular pupil is familiar to users of ZEMAX and OSLO, and more recently to users of CodeV. The authors' recent work has closed up many of the theoretical holes for using Gaussian Quadrature on the field and over wavelength, as well as on non-circular/obscured pupils has suffered. Faster (by literally orders of magnitude), more-informed design are enabled which can access solutions that previous educated guesswork could not. The mathematics are held to a level which is accessable to a general audience.

Biography:

Hong Xiao is a computer scientist and applied mathematician who is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics at University of California at Davis. Her interests include numerical computation, imaging sciences and lately optical design. She earned her PhD from Yale University and her Master's degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, both in Computer Science. Before coming to the United States, she received a Bachelor's degree from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China in Computer Science and Technology.