Thread: Mercator projection "the usefulness of the imperfect"

[Only registered and activated users can see links. ], the European cartographer who with his projection facilitated navigation for the transoceanic fleets of the 16th century, the European and......

"Behind any cartographic projection, there is something that cannot be solved. The difficulty of bringing the three dimensions of the planet to the two dimensions of a map. The [Only registered and activated users can see links. ] and the situation of Mercator as "the bad guy" has a lot of simplification The simplified opinion will tend to place Mercator as "an imperialist and colonialist European who put Europe at the center of the map and drew the continent as much larger than Africa, Asia and Latin America." It is not well known that Gerardus Mercator He even made a map, in cordiform projection, susceptible to being accused of subverting the religious order prevailing in Flanders in the 40s of the 16th century. After the hunt for heretics unleashed in 1544 by the Habsburg authorities, Mercator ended up in prison and was tried. for heresy". (geografiainfinita)

"Currently, most maps are based on modified projections or a combination of different projections, to correct distortions as much as possible. Among the most common are the Lambert polyconic projection, used for educational purposes, or the Winkel projection. -Tripel, adopted by the National Geographic Society in 1998 and increasingly used in atlases and textbooks. However, the most used maps today remain faithful to Gerardus Mercator: online services such as Bing Maps, OpenStreetMap, Google Maps or MapQuest use a variant of the Mercator projection. And also the rectangular maps that are made today of other worlds (Venus, Mars, or Mercury for example) use the Gerardus Mercator system". (bbvaopenmind)


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