A former optical engineering prof was the first person to build a raytracer on a computer (using a rudimentary spreadsheet, probably Lotus 123). To minimize memory usage, he rewrote the Zernike polynomials as [0:N-1] from the traditional [1:N] form.
Still today, you have to a priori know which system is being used to know what Z(2) refers to, because of his influence. And it was a trivial raytracer - but not compared to cosine lookup tables.
Still today, you have to a priori know which system is being used to know what Z(2) refers to, because of his influence. And it was a trivial raytracer - but not compared to cosine lookup tables.