Bibliography

Prof. N. T. FEDOROV, The Current State of Colorimetry, STTI, Moscow 1933, 192 pp., price 2 rubles 50 kopecks, bound 3 rubles 75 kopecks.

The book considers the following questions. Color mixing, primary colors, mixture curves, vector representation of colors and the transition from one set of trichromatic coordinates to another—this is what is set forth in the chapter on the lower metric of color. The chapter on the higher metric of color includes: photometry of various colors, the sensitivity of the eye to spectral colors (visibility of monochromatic color), additivity (superposition of light and color sensations), threshold sensitivity to chromaticity and saturation, the relation of saturation to purity, optimal pigment colors, and the construction of the color solid. The next chapter sets out the technique of color measurements and includes a description of a number of colorimeters, beginning with the simplest—Verriest’s—and ending with the most recent. Further on, the question of “white” light is considered. The last chapter contains resolutions on colorimetry of the International Commission on Illumination (1931). In the appendix the book contains two articles by H. D. Nyberg: “Mathematical Foundations of the Problem of Measuring Color” and “Mathematical Foundations of the Construction of the Color Solid.” At the end there is a bibliography comprising 223 titles of articles and books in Russian and, chiefly, foreign languages.

Prof. N. T. Fedorov himself has worked very much and successfully in the field of color science and colorimetry, and therefore his book is of particular interest. In world literature there has until now been no work that covers the problems of colorimetry in any sufficiently complete way. The present book is the first monograph on this question.

In recent years the attention of physicists, psychologists, and lighting engineers to colorimetry has grown very greatly. The number of scientific and technical works and literary articles devoted to questions of color measurements is fairly large: in America, England, and Germany, and equally in the USSR, these questions are being developed to a considerable extent and with great achievements. This is explained by various causes, of which one of the most important is the growing demands of industry and technology for color measurements convenient in practice. Meanwhile, the enormous scientific and technical data had been scattered. It was not even entirely clear what, properly speaking, entered into the range of questions constituting colorimetry; there was no systematic connection for the entire totality: of initial assumptions, methodology, instrument design, etc., in the field of color measurements.

N. T. Fedorov has coped with his task quite successfully. He has very fortunately gathered into a single whole and, for the first time in world literature, systematized the questions of colorimetry on the basis not only of foreign but, to a known extent, also of Soviet experience.

It must be borne in mind that the author wrote his book for a prepared reader (this is stated in the preface). In places it is presented very concisely and in some cases requires additional work on the reader’s part for a full understanding of the text. Undoubtedly, it would be highly desirable in a subsequent edition to expand the exposition. The author himself notes in the preface that the book lacks systematicity.

Indeed, the book might perhaps have benefited from some redistribution of the material. Thus, the last two chapters—on white light and the decisions of the International Commission—would have been better organically merged with the main content. Or another example: the explanations concerning the choice of the international systems \(X, Y\), and \(Z\) (pp. 61–64) would have been more appropriate in the chapter on the lower color metric (in the paragraph on coordinate transformation).

N. D. Nyberg, in the chapters written by him, has set forth very thoroughly how and why the powerful apparatus of mathematics can be successfully applied to solving a number of questions arising in color measurements and, in particular, in constructing the color body.

In general, the book is a very valuable and necessary monograph. It deserves wide circulation. For universities and technical colleges it will serve as an indispensable textbook, the need for which has until now been very keenly felt.

Certain minor shortcomings (misprints, distribution of material, terminology that is not everywhere successful) scarcely diminish the merits of the book.

P. Tikhodeev