ABSTRACT
Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695) was yet another brilliant and prolific1 contemporary of Newton. Huygens studied waves and optics and made numerous discoveries, including those which bear his name.
HUYGENS-FRESNEL PRINCIPLE The Huygens-Fresnel2 Principle3 states that at any instant, every point on a wavefront belonging to a wave with frequency ν acts as a point source of spherical wavelets [circular in 2-d] with the same frequency. At a later time, a new wavefront, at a distance d = c∆t ahead4 of the old one, will have formed from the superposition of the wavelets.
