Exploring reflection: Designing light reflectors for uniform illumination

摘要

Many students first learn of the law of reflection when they are told about the reflective properties of conics. Typically students are exposed to a curve or surface, and then its reflective properties are derived or verified. In this paper we explore reflection by starting from a desired property of an unknown reflector and proceeding to find a reflector with those properties. This is done in the context of finding a reflector that produces uniform illumination of nearby objects. The reflectors considered are those whose analysis can be reduced to studying curves in two dimensions. [References: 6]