ABSTRACT

THE GEOMETRICAL STUDY OF LENSES was essential for the development of optics in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. 1 This study, which historians have seen as a turning point in the history of optics, was designated as either anaclastics or dioptrics. In writing the history of this chapter, it is common practice to give prominence to Kepler, some of Mersenne’s circle, Willebrord Snellius, and Descartes. Furthermore, the perceived modernity of the optics of this period is frequently explained, partially at least, by external reasons: a very modest technical advance in the construction of optical instruments.