This book was designed to encourage the adoption of simple matrix methods in teaching optics at the undergraduate and technical college level. Although these methods have been somewhat neglected in the past, the authors point to the economy and elegance with which, for a linear system, a wealth of input-output relations can be expressed by a single matrix. Moreover, the field of optics has been enormously enriched by contributions from other disciplines, such as microwave physics and electrical engineering, which employ matrix methods.
Because it is an introductory text, this work...