Statistics of Gravitational Microlensing Magnification. I. Two‐dimensional Lens Distribution

The propagation of light from distant sources through a distribution of clumpy matter, acting as point-mass lenses, produces multiple images that contribute to the total brightness of the observed macroimages. In this paper, we rene the theory of gravitational microlensing for a planar distribution of point masses. In an accompanying paper, we extend the analysis to a three-dimensional lens distribution.