Michael Hayford
Retired at Independent
Pasadena, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolMichael Hayford is a retired chief software architect and optical designer with decades of experience building and evolving LightTools, an industry-standard illumination and ray-tracing product used for HUDs, HMDs, and high-power laser beam transport. He blends deep optical physics—from image-forming and holographic optics to Monte Carlo ray tracing—with practical software engineering, including constrained Levenberg–Marquardt optimization and noisy-objective function tuning. As an original co-author and past product manager, he combined technical leadership with customer-facing responsibilities, release planning, and marketing for Synopsys/Optical Research Associates. Based in Pasadena and trained at the University of Rochester’s Institute of Optics, he is notable for translating advanced numerical methods into robust commercial tools that solved real-world illumination challenges.
8 years of coding experience
38 years of employment as a software developer
BS,MS, Optics, BS,MS, Optics at University of Rochester
Github Skills (11)
geometric10
raytracing10
conda10
forge10
conda-forge9
ray9
jupyter-notebook8
smithy8
jupyter8
python7
xlrd6
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
mjhoptics/opticalglass
Mar 2018 - Oct 2022
Tools for reading commercial optical glass catalogs
Contributions:151 commits, 2 PRs, 97 pushes in 4 years 8 months
mjhoptics/opticalglass-feedstock
Jan 2021 - Nov 2024
A conda-smithy repository for opticalglass.
Contributions:20 pushes, 8 branches in 3 years 11 months
condasmithy
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