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Almost extinguished by the Spanish Inquisition, genius cartographer Mercator revolutionized the study of geography. His "projection" was so visionary that it is still used by NASA to map Mars today.
Gerhard Mercator (1512–1594) was the most important cartographer and globemaker of the 16th century. He is particularly remembered for his publication Atlas sive Cosmographicae Meditationes de Fabrica Mundi et Fabricati Figura (1595), and for his specific cylindrical map projection (1569), which is still used widely today. This book brings together the latest research on Mercator with a view to his sources and his relationships with other scientific disciplines and cartographers of his time, as well as his role in the wider worlds of Renaissance cartography and Humanism.
Gerard Mercator created the most-used map of all time. Mercator's Projection is still the standard view of the world. This text examines the evolution of mapmaking from art to science that forms the backdrop to the story of Mercator.
In Rhumb Lines and Map Wars, Mark Monmonier offers an insightful, richly illustrated account of the controversies surrounding Flemish cartographer Gerard Mercator's legacy. He takes us back to 1569, when Mercator announced a clever method of portraying the earth on a flat surface, creating the first projection to take into account the earth's roundness. As Monmonier shows, mariners benefited most from Mercator's projection, which allowed for easy navigation of the high seas with rhumb lines—clear-cut routes with a constant compass bearing—for true direction. But the projection's popularity among nineteenth-century sailors led to its overuse—often in inappropriate, non-navigational ways...
Publisher Description
A biography of the sixteenth-century cartographer Gerardus Mercator, who invented a method of projecting the curvature of the Earth's surface on to a flat sheet of paper.
This book traces the history of pictorial imagery associated with Terra Australis, showing the link between art and exploration.
Ayesha Ramachandran reconstructs the imaginative struggles of early modern artists, philosophers, and writers to make sense of something that we take for granted: the world, imagined as a whole. 'The Worldmakers' moves beyond histories of globalisation to explore how 'the world' itself - variously understood as an object of inquiry, a comprehensive category, and a system of order - was self-consciously shaped by human agents.