Monthly Archives: March 2017

The history of the differential Mueller-Jones formalism

Sorry I have not been very active updating this website lately, but research has continued and I have authored several publications since I last updated. You can see them in my Google Scholar profile and others are now under submission.  Anyway, in this post I want to highlight one of my recent publications which is titled Historical revision of the differential Stokes–Mueller formalism: discussion. This paper that was published last month in J. Opt. Soc. Am. A 34, 410-414 (2017).

This paper (which is classified as a “discussion paper” in JOSA-A) in  makes a historical revision of several early contributions to the differential Stokes–Mueller formalism that have been totally overlooked. Most importantly it demonstrates that this formalism was pioneered by Paul Soleillet in 1929, almost 50 years earlier that it was assumed.

Photos of early pioneers of the optical polarization calculus during the first half of the 20th century. From left to right: Francis Perrin (1901–1992) (AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives), Hans Mueller (1900–1965), and R. Clark Jones (1916–2004) .

Despite many attempts, I have been unable to find a photo of Paul Soleillet (1902–1992). So let me make here a public call in case anyone is lucky enough to find a photo of him, do not hesitate to share it with me.