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We've always associated the term with mapmaking and, yes indeed, a Yahoo! search resulted in a selection of products and projects named for Gerardus Mercator, including a fascinating magazine of maps and exploration called Mercator's World. Unfortunately, we found little additional information on the man himself so we switched our tactics and headed straight to some biographical reference sites. We began with the online encyclopedia, Comptons.com. Typing "mercator" into their search box led us to a biography of the Flemish mapmaker and mathematician. It turns out Mercator is best known for his mapping technique in which
parallels of latitude and meridians of longitude are rendered as straight lines to display an accurate ratio of latitude to longitude. This 1569 innovation became known as a Mercator projection. It was widely adapted for use in navigation charts, since a Mercator-projection map permits navigators to easily plot straight-line courses. The Peters Projection, an interesting twentieth-century alternative to the Mercator projection, seeks to reduce geographic and historical biases and distortions. We visited one other biography site for a summing up. At the searchable, multilingual Biographie.net, we learned a little more about Gerardus Mercator. Mercator was the first person to use the term atlas to refer to a collection of maps; an unfinished edition of the atlas he had begun compiling was published in 1606 after his death, and was known as the Mercator-Hondius Atlas.
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