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This paper is an eclectic compilation of designs, ideas, observations, and lessons learned over the twenty-six year career of an optical design engineer. And, un-be-knownst to Warren Smith, he has played a significant and influential roll in this career, as I am certain he has in many others. More often than not, when one thinks of influential people in their careers, names will surface for which there are tight bonds, friendship, or a long history of contact etc. But how often do we name those whom we have never met, or at best, know casually through contact at professional conferences? I believe that Warren Smith holds the unique position of having influenced the careers of thousands of people, while simultaneously having knowledge of a very small fraction of them. I am confident that Warren is unaware of most of the lives he has touched and changed for the better. How many times have YOU reached for your copy of 'Modern Optical Engineering', or gone running through the halls, searching for someone else's copy that you can quickly borrow? By the way, I have one observation/question that I keep asking myself. Warren Smith initially wrote Modern Optical Engineering like, back in the 1920's or something. My question is 'How can it still be considered MODERN optical engineering?' Shouldn't it be 'Sunset' optical engineering, or 'Relatively Old' optical engineering or something? Also, it seems that all Warren basically did, is publish to existing stuff. Just about everything in his book was already known in the field of optics. All he did was to compile existing information, arrange it in a coherent form, add some words and pictures, and publish. Well HECK! I figured that I could do THAT! So I Xeroxed the pages of MOE and brought them to the SPIE publisher and said that I had a book on optical engineering that I'd like to publish. They seemed very interested. When I showed them the pages of my 'first draft', they quickly showed me the way out. I still don't get it. How come Warren gets away with it but I don't?
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