Everyone interested in the field of optics and lens design should know about the sweeping changes and powerful tools that modern software has made available. This second edition of Lens Design: Automatic and quasi-autonomous computational methods and techniques shows how these new tools can design systems in minutes that would have required weeks or months of labor using older methods.

Powerful search routines that can quickly produce excellent designs starting with plane-parallel plates are described. Examples include a 12 element zoom lens, a superachromatic telescope objective, eyepieces, infrared lenses, spy cameras, plastic aspheres, laser beam shapers, X-ray optics, and more. The principles are explained, and data files are provided so the user can duplicate these systems and learn how to use the new software to solve unexpected problems should they occur. Automatic substitution of real glass types for a glass model, and automatic matching to the testplates of a selected vendor are fully explained with examples.

Polarization raytracing, lens coatings, thin-film design, free-form mirrors, and automatic calculation of a tolerance budget are fully discussed. No practising lens designer's toolkit is complete without the up-to-date and comprehensive knowledge presented here.

Donald C Dilworth received a BS in Physics from MIT in 1961. He is the developer of design software starting in 1962 for the Apollo project, and the author of the PSD III optimization algorithm, which is part of the SYNOPSYS(TM) lens design program. He is the author of 27 publications and owner of 13 patents.