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Comment by romwell | Hacker News Reader

A rough ASCII sketch to illustrate this:

Regular lens:

        _____
       /     \
      /       \

Fresnel lens:

        _____
     /|/     \|\

That does not work at all and just confused me. The angles must change on the interrupted parts to follow the general curve of the lens' surface.

As a counterpoint the GPs diagram was useful for me (perhaps because I have a background involving some study of optics).

Granted the parents picture is way better than the rough ASCIIart