Word: gerardus
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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DIED. ARTHUR ROBINSON, 89, cartographer whose work dramatically improved the way the world looks on maps; in Madison, Wis. Mapmakers had long struggled with the problem of representing the round Earth on a flat map. The once widely accepted version by the Flemish Gerardus Mercator, for example, distorted Greenland to appear four times its actual size. In 1963, by focusing on aesthetics--and only later incorporating a mathematical formula--he devised a projection that became the basis for world maps by Rand McNally and many federal agencies...
...also show up in Chinese studies of the heavens. A likely product of this cumulative knowledge is an early chart of the night sky found in the Chinese city of Dunhuang in Gansu province. The manuscript, which closely resembles a projection developed eight centuries later by the Flemish cartographer, Gerardus Mercator, accurately depicts 1,500 stars that are all recognizable today...