Some of the major deficiencies of Indian higher education include:
- the scarcity of well-written textbooks authored by reputed professors and published by highly rated publishers,
- use of help books by students to pass examination and
- over-emphasis on rote learning with little or no training on problem-solving.
To improve the quality of education, it is essential to make good books available at a reasonable cost. The latest research and learning theories suggest that outcome-based learning with interactive text in-text questions and practice problems should provide a way to engage an average student in the learning process and enhance her/his learning experiences. Similarly, mastery in problem-solving is mandatory for nurturing creativity. This, no doubt, is a challenging task.
These ideas formed the basis of our work when we began to develop the manuscript of our book on Wave Optics, one of the most fascinating courses taught to undergraduate science students of major/honours and general degree programmes. We aimed to empower learners and enable them to see its principles at work and develop problem-solving skills by interspersing problems with graded difficulty levels throughout the text.
A conscious effort was made to help learners apply theoretical knowledge to real-life problems and phenomena with the hope that the book’s utility would be considerably enhanced. As we now know, the emergence of lasers, holography and fiber optics in recent years led to applications in communication, optical computing and medicine. Moreover, their applications have found revolutionary applications in space science, geospatial imaging, and cryptography in space, defence, agriculture, medicine, and mineralogy. We were conscious that a sound knowledge of their fundamental principles and developments would immensely enhance the utility of our textbook. The Wave Optics by Suresh Garg, Sanjay Gupta and CK Ghosh, published by PHI Learning Private Limited, New Delhi, fulfils many of these requirements and should be extremely useful to Indian students. Some of its salient features are:
- Comprehensive coverage of the syllabi of all major universities as well as the new UGC syllabus
- Rigorous treatment of subject matter while retaining a learner-friendly approach
- Several in-text pedagogical questions, solved examples and practice problems to support self-learning.
It is said that a diagram is worth a thousand words. With faith in this dictum, we have tried to explain concepts using diagrams as and where required.
Happy Reading!
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