Bruce Harding
Bruce Harding is a gemstone cutter and mechanical design engineer & mathematician. A Recipient of the EFMLS Lapidary Award in 1975 he completed GIA and GAGB gemological courses between 1974 and 1980. Best known for his work “Faceting Limits,” (in Gems and Gemology, the magazine of the Gemological Institute of America, Fall 1975 edition) he identified the effect of an observers head blocking rays of illumination for the main facets of a number of gem materials including diamond. The method employed was to calculate rays that should be returned to the viewer’s eye (10° per eye) but would involve illumination blocked by the viewer’s head. This was done for rays that returned to either eye, to and from each of the main facet groups; crown to table, table to crown, table to table and crown to crown. Harding’s name became well known in the world of diamond cut and this approach led him in 1986 to develop perhaps the first ever ray path analysis computer software. Harding was a speaker at the International Diamond Cut Conference (IDCC) in Moscow in 2004.”