Tomato salad problem

If the crystals have no systematic elongation or flattening and no preferential orientation they may be considered to be spheres and their cross sections in a polished section to be circles. The radii of these are measured with a Zeiss Particle-Size Analyzer. This is a semiautomatic device which allows for classification of 48 different radii. The sizes thus obtained are not the real crystallite size, since a crystallite (sphere) with radius r in the polished section may be cut so as to represent a circle with a smaller radius p. For obvious reasons this problem is referred to in the German literature as the Tomaten-salat Problem (Tomato Salad Problem). A simple mathematical solution which is especially adapted for a digital computer was developed in a recent publication (0- Figure 7 shows the evaluation of the true crystallite-size distribution P r) from the measured distribution q p). 

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