In the same basic vein as yesterday's post about thermodynamics, the following poll contains a list of physicists who are not household names, but who made significant contributions to the science of optics. Which of them is the best?
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I'm going to go with Ibn al-Hay-tham, who lived in the Islamic empire from 965-1030. This guy essentially invented physics and it is a shame that most physicists do not know about him. I ever get a faculty job then I'm putting his portrait up on the wall along with Einstein and von Neumann.
As far as optics is concerned, he is the guy who first proposed that we see things because light rays bounce off objects and into our eyes, rather than because our eyes emit some sort of rays which bounce off objects as the Greeks believed. He also proved that light rays travel in straight lines, basically by looking at things through tubes, essentially inventing the scientific method as a byproduct. This may seem like pretty basic stuff, but it is the foundation that geometric optics was later built upon.
For an account of al-Hay-tham's contributions to optics, see here and for more background on his life see the obligatory Wikipedia article.
A few others:
Fermat--principle of least time helped develop the theoretical underpinning of geometric optics. (Which then later contributed to the principle of least action, which itself informed QED. So this went full circle).
Maxwell: I realize you're going for the less-well-known physicists, but the Maxwell equations! And then he showed that this predicted the existence of EM waves, which thus wedded electrodynamics to light. He also gets major points for discovering that color perception could be made out of a combination of red, green, and blue and developing the first color photos.
Hertz: If physics lives and dies by experiment, then Hertz gets major credit for confirming Maxwell's predictions of EM waves. Helped develop radio, the dipole antenna, and did work on establishing the photoelectric effect (thus leading to quantum optics).
Whoever invented corrective lenses: Because I'd be blind without them.
I'll second the mention of Ibn Al-Haytham (often called Alhazen or Alhacen in some Western sources). Others? Well, I don't know much about Huygens full body of work or career, but I find his idea of wavelets tremendously useful for visualizing things.
My own work is on beating the diffraction limit in microscopy, and in that field the main person from days of olde is Abbe, who did his work before Rayleigh (I think). However, freshman textbooks give all the glory to Rayleigh, who studied resolution limits in the context of the telescope.
Finally, I'd say that Einstein should get some credit in optics. His theory of the photoelectric effect was important for establishing photons in physical theory, then he worked out the theory of stimulated and spontaneous emission (which led to the laser).
Fresnel (or his lenses) is a household name. At least it was in my home growing up - but my parents both like lighthouses.
But my vote goes to Young, for pulling off what seems like an impossible experiment to do without lasers, even if the awesome mathematics of Fraunhofer (not to mention Airy) gets my utmost respect.
PS - glad you got the comments link fixed.
Pendry.
Because, dude! Negative index of refraction!
Feynman of course. QED is of course the description of light. Or Maxwell, by much the same reasoning.
(Just kidding - I voted Young.)
Michaelson is an obvious omission.
Where'd Huygens go? Probably off to have a drink with Fermat...