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Born into the Age of Discovery, Gerard
Mercator lived through an extraordinary era of intellectual
and scientific expansion. Among those fueling this progress
were the cartographers, who painstakingly sifted through
the constant flow of new information and evidence to create
ever more accurate pictures of the planet. Mercator was
the greatest of them all -- a poor boy from the Low Countries
who attended one of Europe's top universities, was persecuted
and imprisoned by the Inquisition, but survived to coin
the term "atlas" and to produce the so-called
projection for which he is known. Devoutly religious, yet
gripped by Aristotelian science, Mercator struggled to reconcile
the two, a conflict mirrored by the growing clash in Europe
between humanism and the Church.
Before 1568, navigation charts used by sailors
did not correctly account for the fact that the world was
round. Mercator solved the dimensional riddle that had vexed
cosmographers for so long: How could the three-dimensional
globe be converted into a two-dimensional map while retaining
true compass bearings? The projection revolutionized navigation
and has become the most common worldview. Even today, NASA
uses Mercator's projection to map Mars. Mercator's equations
allowed cartographers to produce charts from which they
could easily navigate, regardless of the size distortion
the map produced. On a broader scale, the map brought about
a paradigm shift in our conception of the world. For the
first time, people were able to see the world on a single
sheet of paper and to see their place within it.
Nicholas Crane, a geographer himself, has
combined a keen eye for historical detail with a gift for
vivid storytelling to produce a masterly biography -- the
first ever in English -- of the man who mapped the planet.
Nicholas Crane, a writer and adventurer,
is the author of two acclaimed books, Two Degrees West
and Clear Waters Rising. He lives in London and is
a well-known media personality throughout the United Kingdom.
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