Optics began with the development of lenses by the ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians, followed by theories on light and vision developed by ancient Greek philosophers, and the development of geometrical optics in the Greco-Roman world.
 The word "optics" is derived from the Greek term "τα ὀπτικά" meaning "appearance, look".
 Optics was significantly reformed by the developments in the medieval Islamic world, such as the beginnings of physical and physiological optics, and then significantly advanced in early modern Europe, where diffractive optics began.
 These earlier studies on optics are now known as "classical optics".
 The term "modern optics" refers to areas of optical research that largely developed in the 20th century, such as wave optics and quantum optics.
Ground state depletion microscopy (GSD Microscopy) is an implementation of the RESOLFT concept.
 The method was proposed in 1995 and experimentally demonstrated in 2007.
 It is the second concept to overcome the diffraction barrier in far-field optical microscopy published by Stefan Hell.
 Using nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamonds a resolution of up to 7.8 nm was achieved in 2009.
 This is far below the diffraction limit (~200 nm).
Near-field scanning optical microscopy (NSOM/SNOM) is a microscopy technique for nanostructure investigation that breaks the far field resolution limit by exploiting the properties of evanescent waves.
 In SNOM, the excitation laser light is focused through an aperture with a diameter smaller than the excitation wavelength, resulting in an evanescent field (or near-field) on the far side of the aperture.
 When the sample is scanned at a small distance below the aperture, the optical resolution of transmitted or reflected light is limited only by the diameter of the aperture.
 In particular, lateral resolution of 20 nm and vertical resolution of 2–5 nm have been demonstrated.
Sparrow's Resolution Limit is an estimate of the angular resolution limit of an optical instrument.
Christoph Cremer (born in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany) is a German physicist and professor at the Ruprecht-Karls-University Heidelberg, honorary professor at the University of Mainz and group leader at the Institute of Molecular Biology (IMB) a newly established research centre on the campus of the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany, who has successfully overcome the conventional limit of resolution that applies to light based investigations (the Abbe limit) by a range of different methods (1971/1978 development of the concept of 4Pi-microscopy; 1996 localization microscopy SPDM; 1997 spatially structured illumination SMI).
 In September 2014 he founded the NPO LuciaOptics to support the use of Super-resolution microscopy in the fields of molecular biology, biomedicine, microbiology, virology, pharmaceutical sciences and diagnosis
An electron microscope is a microscope that uses a beam of accelerated electrons as a source of illumination.
 As the wavelength of an electron can be up to 100,000 times shorter than that of visible light photons, electron microscopes have a higher resolving power than light microscopes and can reveal the structure of smaller objects.
 A scanning transmission electron microscope has achieved better than 50 pm resolution in annular dark-field imaging mode and magnifications of up to about 10,000,000x whereas most light microscopes are limited by diffraction to about 200 nm resolution and useful magnifications below 2000x.
Scanning Joule Expansion Microscopy is a form of scanning probe microscopy heavily based on atomic force microscopy that maps the temperature distribution along a surface.
 Resolutions down to 10 nm have been achieved and 1 nm resolution is theoretically possible.
 Thermal measurements at the nanometer scale are of both academic and industrial interest, particularly in regards to nanomaterials and modern integrated circuits.
Ernst Karl Abbe HonFRMS (23 January 1840 – 14 January 1905) was a German physicist, optical scientist, entrepreneur, and social reformer.
 Together with Otto Schott and Carl Zeiss, he laid the foundation of modern optics.
 Abbe developed numerous optical instruments.
 He was a co-owner of Carl Zeiss AG, a German manufacturer of research microscopes, astronomical telescopes, planetariums and other optical systems.
Vertico spatially modulated illumination (Vertico-SMI) is the fastest light microscope for the 3D analysis of complete cells in the nanometer range.
 It is based on two technologies developed in 1996, SMI (spatially modulated illumination) and SPDM (spectral precision distance microscopy).
 The effective optical resolution of this optical nanoscope has reached the vicinity of 5 nm in 2D and 40 nm in 3D and surpasses the 200 nm resolution limit predicted by Abbe‘s law.
 Abbe postulated in 1873 the theoretical limit of resolution of optical microscopy.
Critical illumination or Nelsonian illumination is a method of specimen illumination used for transmitted and reflected light (trans- and epi-illuminated) optical microscopy.
 Critical illumination focuses an image of a light source on to the specimen for bright illumination.
 Critical illumination generally has problems with evenness of illumination as an image of the illumination source (for example a halogen lamp filament) is visible in the resulting image.
 Köhler illumination has largely replaced critical illumination in modern scientific light microscopy although it requires additional optics which less expensive and simpler light microscopes may not have.

Question: The vertico spatially modulated illumination, that surpasses the 200 nm resolution limit predicted by a German physicist who laid the foundation of modern optics, was what?
Answer: the fastest light microscope