If Paul Soleillet has a special section in this website this is probably because I have spent more time reading an understanding his PhD thesis than any other scientific paper. And I have to confess that at the beginning (my first contact with his work was 2011) I understood very little of it. However, this last two years I have been  rereading this work several times, understanding more and more of it.  And every time I was more amazed.

Last year I published how Soleillet pioneered the differential polarization calculus in the third part of his thesis. This year, together with my colleague Shane Nichols, I have published a new paper that emphasizes the contributions of Soleillet to the description of coherence and polarization in 3D (first and second part of his thesis).

Oriol Arteaga and Shane Nichols, “Soleillet’s formalism of coherence and partial polarization in 2D and 3D: application to fluorescence polarimetry,” J. Opt. Soc. Am. A35, 1254-1260 (2018)

I think that some of the results that we emphasize in this paper, originally discovered by Soleillet but that we put in a more recognizable, format  are very important for the  fluorescence polarimetry. If you are interested in the topic, I think our paper will be very useful.

Note about Soleillet’s biographical information

I am still looking for a photo of Paul Soleillet. I cannot believe that a person who died in 1992 and worked in major French scientific institutions for many decades has NO photo! I contact every place where he worked, without any luck.

However a couple of weeks ago I visited the  Archives Nationales in Paris and I was able to access to several original documents of Paul Soleillet from when he  enrolled the École normale supérieure. See below some of them.