Goodbye Aberration: Physicist

Solves 2,000-Year-Old Optical

Problem
Jul 05, 2019

When you look through your viewfinder and things seem a little bit blurry
or lacking definition, itʼs probably because you are using an “el cheapo”
lens. So you read reviews and buy a much more expensive lens, and what
do you do next?

You donʼt go out to learn about composition and lighting to make better
pictures. No. If you are a conscious and professional photographer, you
start pixel-peeping to rationalize your expensive purchase.

And what do you find then?

The problem is still there. Right there, in the corners. Theyʼre soft. The
center is OK, but the corners are still soft. So you read more reviews and
buy a better lens.
Lather, rinse, repeat.

But itʼs not the manufacturerʼs fault, nor yours for not having enough
money to buy a perfect lens. Blame Greek mathematician Diocles, who
formulated the problem over two thousand years ago in his book Burning
Mirrors.

The Problem
You see, lenses are made from spherical surfaces. The problem arises
when light rays outside the center of the lens or hitting at an angle canʼt
be focused at the desired distance in a point because of differences in
refraction.

Which makes the center of the image sharper than the corners. Which
leads to countless YouTube reviews on lenses. And countless hours of
watch time. And makes advertisers and YouTubers happy.

In his 1690 book, Treatise on Light, astronomer Christiaan Huygens

points out that both Isaac Newton (the greatest scientist of all time) and
Gottfried Leibniz (the last universal genius) tried to solve the problem,
but couldnʼt:

As has in fact occurred to two prominent Geometricians, Messieurs

Newton and Leibnitz, with respect to the problem of the figure of
glasses for collecting rays when one of the surfaces is given.

It is appropriate to mention that Newton invented a telescope that solved

the chromatic aberration, but not the spherical aberration.

In a 1949 article published in the Royal Society Proceedings, Wasserman

and Wolf formulated the problem—how to design a lens without spherical
aberration—in an analytical way, and it has since been known as the
Wasserman-Wolf problem.

They “proposed to use two aspheric adjacent surfaces to correct

spherical and coma aberrations, with a solution consisting of two first-
order simultaneous differential equations, which are solved numerically
according to Malacara-Hernández et al.”

In other words, the solution was an approximation solved with numerical

analysis (brute-force with computers), not a definitive one. Moreover, the
solution involved aspherical elements, which are harder to manufacture in
a precise way and are thus more costly.

To this day, when you see that your lens has aspherical elements to
correct for optical aberrations and give you sharper images wide open,
you can thank Wasserman-Wolf.

However, the importance of solving this problem goes well beyond giving
you a sharper picture of your feet for your nine Instagram followers. It
would help make better and cheaper to manufacture optical systems in
all areas, be it telescopes, microscopes, and everything in between.

As you can imagine, everyone had been trying.

The Solution
Fast forward to 2018 when Héctor A. Chaparro-Romo, a doctoral student
at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), who had been
trying to solve this problem for 3 years, invited Rafael G. González-
Acuña, a doctoral student from Tec de Monterrey, to help him solve the
problem.

At first, González-Acuña did not want to devote resources to what he

knew to be a millenary, impossible to solve problem. But upon the
insistence of Héctor Chaparro-Romo, he decided to accept the
challenge.

After months of working on solving the problem, Rafael González-Acuña

recalls, “I remember one morning I was making myself a slice of bread
with Nutella, when suddenly, I said out loud: Mothers! It is there!”

(Note: Mothers, from the Spanish word “Madres,” means, of course,

many moms. But in this context it is equivalent to the expression “Holy
sh*t!” in English, or, to a lesser extent, “Eureka!” in Greek.)

He then ran to his computer and started programming the idea. When he
executed the solution and saw that it worked, he says he jumped all over
the place. It is unclear whether he finished eating the bread with Nutella.

Afterwards, the duo ran a simulation and calculated the efficacy with 500
rays, and the resulting average satisfaction for all examples was
99.9999999999%. Which, of course, is great news for gear reviewers on
YouTube, as they will still be able to argue about the 0.0000000001% of
sharpness difference among lens brands.

Their findings were published in the article General Formula for Bi-
Aspheric Singlet Lens Design Free of Spherical Aberration, in the journal
Applied Optics.

The image below shows the algebraic formula. “In this equation we
describe how the shape of the second aspherical surface of the given
lens should be given a first surface, which is provided by the user, as well
as the object-image distance,” explains González-Acuña. “The second
surface is such that it corrects all the aberration generated by the first
surface, and the spherical aberration is eliminated.”
The formula solves the Wasserman-Wolf problem, formulated analytically
in 1949, but known to scientists for about two thousand years.

The Levi-Civita Problem

As part of this research, Rafael G. González-Acuña, Alejandro Chaparro-
Romo and Julio Gutiérrez-Vega also published the article “General
Formula to Design Freeform Singlet Free of Spherical Aberration and
Astigmatism“ in Applied Optics, where they give an analytical solution to
the Levi-Civita problem formulated in 1900.

The Levi-Civita problem, which has existed without a solution for over a
century, was also considered a mythical problem by the specialized
community.

It is important to note that both solutions—the Wasserman-Wolf problem

and the Levi-Cita problem—are analytical, with symbolic math. This
means that the solution to a problem, no matter how you change the
input variables, is unique and not an approximation.

So… can we expect cheaper and better lenses?

Better? Yes. Truly sharper from corner to corner.

Cheaper? probably not. Even though lenses will be cheaper to

manufacture, remember that once somebody stamps the “made for
photographers” sticker on a product, it is priced many times higher
because of the “added value” to your artistry.

Regardless, I can only wish Rafael González-Acuña, Alejandro Chaparro-

Romo and Julio Gutiérrez-Vega a long and healthy life. Given enough
time, maybe they can also solve the “One Memory Card Slot Problem” of
the Nikon Z7. To be fair, that oneʼs been around for less than a year.

(via Tec de Monterrey)

About the author: Eduardo Machuca is Yet-Another-Photographer that

taught for eight years at both the bachelorʼs and masterʼs degree level in
advertising photography. He lives, and has always lived, in Mexico, and
loves traveling around the hood and taking care of his alebrijes, with the
help of an alux.