ABSTRACT
In his landmark paper of 1852 [1], Sir George Stokes developed the tools to put the interference laws of Fresnel and Arago on a mathematical footing. Stokes defined quantities A, B, C, and D that Chandrasekhar [2] almost 100 years later labeled I, Q, U, and V and called the Stokes parameters. Thus, the Mueller-Stokes formalism that allows us to deal with any type of polarized or unpolarized light traces its origins to the experiments of Fresnel and Arago [3] around 1817.
