Applied paraxial methods and some philosophical questions

摘要

The present paper is dedicated to some aspects of the paraxial geometric optical method, which are implicitly used, but often are misunderstood, especially by students. We discuss the symbolic character of the method versus its ability to represent real optical paths and the link to Fourier optics. Further special applications, such as the construction of the imaging properties of elliptical mirrors, are considered. The paper contains practical and comprehensible examples from various formerly published projects to explicitly illustrate relations and construction strategies, as they might appear in a text book on the topic.