Marie Alfred Cornu, French physicist and academic (born 1842)

Marie Alfred Cornu was a French physicist and professor of École polytechnique. The French generally refer to him as Alfred Cornu. The Cornu spiral, a graphical device for the computation of light intensities in Fresnel's model of near-field diffraction, is named after him. The spiral is also used in geometric design of roads. The Cornu depolarizer is also named after him.