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The World of Gerard Mercator: The Mapmaker Who Revolutionised Geography

The World of Gerard Mercator: The Mapmaker Who Revolutionised Geography

Paperback

Historical FiguresEnvironmental StudiesGeography

ISBN10: 0007100817
ISBN13: 9780007100811
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Published: Nov 7 2005
Pages: 288
Weight: 0.60
Height: 0.76 Width: 5.00 Depth: 8.00
Language: English

The true story of Gerard Mercator, the greatest map-maker of all time, who was condemned to death as a heretic.

'Geographie and Chronologie I may call the Sunne and the Moone, the right eye and the left, of all history.'

In 'The World of Gerard Mercator', Andrew Taylor chronicles both the story of a great astronomer and mathematician, who was condemned to death as a heretic, and the history of that most fascinating conjunction of science and art: the drawing of maps. Gerard Mercator was born in Flanders in 1512. In addition to creating accurate globes of the earth and the stars, he was the first person to use latitude and longitude for navigation and he created the most-used map of all time: Mercator's Projection is still the standard view of the world, the one we all envisage when we think of a map of the globe. Simply finding the best solution to the impossible challenge of reproducing the spherical world on a flat sheet of paper was a considerable achievement in itself - something geographers and map-makers had been trying to do for centuries, but Mercator also created the map of the world that would form the basis of the modern age, an image of the continents for the common man.

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Historical Figures