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Happy birthday to Gerardus Mercator (1512-1594) renown Flemish cartographer.
What made Mercator a great #cartographer, was in fact his abilities as a #mathematician -and like those of us scientists who feel compelled also to create art he was wasn’t hindered by his immense ability as an engraver. He produced beautiful world maps (a version of which is depicted in this print), globes, 
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but his name has gone down in history for the Mercator Projection. The Mercator projection is a cylindrical map projection which became the standard map projection for nautical purposes because of its ability to represent lines of constant course, known as rhumb lines or loxodromes, as straight segments. While the linear scale is constant in all directions around any point, thus preserving the angles and the shapes of small objects 2/n
(which makes the projection conformal), the Mercator projection distorts the size and shape of large objects, as the scale increases from the Equator to the poles, where it becomes infinite.
The Mercator projection will be quite familiar to you. It is generally used as a sort of ‘default’ projection, even today. If you are Canadian, like me, you might be lead to over-estimate the size of the arctic archipelago and underestimate the immensity of the African continent, 3/4
due to the ubiquity of this projection. But its goal was not to represent relative area (which it does poorly). However, his achievement was fundamental to the explosion in exploration that came after his paradigm breaking world maps.
https://minouette.etsy.com/listing/170817596
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