Understanding Optics with Python

This book introduces optics through the use of simulations, namely, Python. Students, researchers, and engineers will be able to use Python simulations to better understand the basic concepts of optics and professors will be able to provide immediate visualizations of the complex ideas. Readers will learn programming in Python. Throughout this book, a simulated laboratory will be provided where students can learn by 'hands on' exploration. The text will cover most of the standard topics of traditional optics.

Vasudevan Lakshminarayanan is currently a professor of vision science, physics and electrical and computer engineering. He has held visiting and faculty appointments at the universities of California at Berkeley, at Irvine, University of Missouri and the University of Michigan (where is he currently a visiting scholar of physics). He has had numerous honors, including Fellow of OSA, SPIE, AAAS, APS, IoP, etc. and the recipient of various awards including most recently the Esther Hoffman Beller medal of OSA, and the Optics Educator award of SPIE. He was a KITP Scholar at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at UCSB, a current member of the optics advisory board of the International Center for Theoretical Physics at Trieste, Italy and a technical staff member of Vidyasmart, a start-up in Waterloo devoted to developing educational technology and applications. He was a finalist of the AAAS Science and technology policy fellowship program. He is a founding member of the UNESCO ALOP program. He also serves as a member of the international steering committee of the International Year of Light 2015. He has authored or edited about 13 books, a member of the editorial board or technical editor of a number of journals (e.g., Optics Letters, Journal of Modern Optics, American Journal of Bioengineering, OPN,etc.) and over 300 publications in topics ranging from optical physics and engineering , neuroscience, biomedical image processing, bioengineering, applied math and ophthalmology/ optometry and science policyHassen Ghalila is a Professor of Physics in the Laboratoire de Spectroscopie Atomique Moleculaire et Applications (LSAMA) in the Department of Physics - Faculty of Sciences of Tunis - Tunis El Manar University. Since 2005 he has been the leader of the Numerical and Simulations modeling team at LSMA. He received his Ph.D. from Orsay on numerical codes for plasma physics.