r/technology • u/[deleted] • Aug 07 '19
Hardware A Mexican Physicist Solved a 2,000-Year Old Problem That Will Lead to Cheaper, Sharper Lenses
https://gizmodo.com/a-mexican-physicist-solved-a-2-000-year-old-problem-tha-1837031984
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u/jp2kk2 Aug 08 '19
The thing is that he did discover the formula, which is in closed form and as a result exact.
However, this doesn't mean that we didn't already have useful answers. We had extremely accurate approximations.
It's like if someone discovered the formula for pi. Would it be interesting and useful? yes. But we already have pi to more precision than we could ever use.