Gerardus Mercator

Gerardus Mercator (1512 to 1594) was a Flemish geographer, cosmographer and cartographer, born Geert de Kremer in Rupelmonde in Flanders. He is best known for the world map of 1569, drawn on a new projection that shows courses of constant bearing as straight lines, an idea still used in nautical charts. He was also a maker of terrestrial and celestial globes and of scientific instruments, notably astrolabes and astronomical rings, and his globes were considered the finest in the world for sixty years. He also had interests in theology, philosophy, history, mathematics and geomagnetism, and he drew his geographical knowledge from a library of over a thousand books and maps and a wide correspondence rather than from travel. After a period of persecution as a suspected heretic he moved from Leuven to Duisburg, where he lived for his last thirty years. His Atlas of 1595 was the first use of the word atlas in connection with maps.