The Mercator projection (mərˈkeɪtər) is a cylindrical map projection presented by Flemish geographer and cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569. It became the standard map projection for navigation because it is unique in representing north as up and south as down everywhere while preserving local directions and shapes. The map is thereby conformal. As a side effect, the Mercator projection inflates the size of objects away from the equator. This inflation is very small near the equator but accelerates with increasing latitude to become infinite at the poles. As a result, landmasses such as Greenland, Antarctica, Canada and Russia appear far larger than they actually are relative to landmasses near the equator, such as Central Africa.
There is some controversy over the origins of the Mercator. German polymath Erhard Etzlaub engraved miniature "compass maps" (about 10×8 cm) of Europe and parts of Africa that spanned latitudes 0°–67° to allow adjustment of his portable pocket-size sundials. The projection found on these maps, dating to 1511, was stated by John Snyder in 1987 to be the same projection as Mercator's. However, given the geometry of a sundial, these maps may well have been based on the similar central cylindrical projection, a limiting case of the gnomonic projection, which is the basis for a sundial. Snyder amended his assessment to "a similar projection" in 1993.
Joseph Needham, a historian of China, wrote that the Chinese developed the Mercator projection hundreds of years before Mercator did, using it in star charts during the Song Dynasty. However, this was a simple, and common, case of misidentification. The projection in use was the equirectangular projection.
Portuguese mathematician and cosmographer Pedro Nunes first described the mathematical principle of the loxodrome and its use in marine navigation. In 1537, he proposed constructing a nautical atlas composed of several large-scale sheets in the cylindrical equidistant projection as a way to minimize distortion of directions.
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.
Organisé en deux parties, ce cours présente les bases théoriques et pratiques des systèmes d’information géographique, ne nécessitant pas de connaissances préalables en informatique. En suivant cette
Organisé en deux parties, ce cours présente les bases théoriques et pratiques des systèmes d’information géographique, ne nécessitant pas de connaissances préalables en informatique. En suivant cette
Organisé en deux parties, ce cours présente les bases théoriques et pratiques des systèmes d’information géographique, ne nécessitant pas de connaissances préalables en informatique. En suivant cette
La Physique Générale I (avancée) couvre la mécanique du point et du solide indéformable. Apprendre la mécanique, c'est apprendre à mettre sous forme mathématique un phénomène physique, en modélisant l
Le but du cours de physique générale est de donner à l'étudiant les notions de base nécessaires à la compréhension des phénomènes physiques. L'objectif est atteint lorsque l'étudiant est capable de pr
This course aims to introduce the basic principles of machine learning in the context of the digital humanities. We will cover both supervised and unsupervised learning techniques, and study and imple
In cartography, a map projection is any of a broad set of transformations employed to represent the curved two-dimensional surface of a globe on a plane. In a map projection, coordinates, often expressed as latitude and longitude, of locations from the surface of the globe are transformed to coordinates on a plane. Projection is a necessary step in creating a two-dimensional map and is one of the essential elements of cartography. All projections of a sphere on a plane necessarily distort the surface in some way and to some extent.
The Mercator projection (mərˈkeɪtər) is a cylindrical map projection presented by Flemish geographer and cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569. It became the standard map projection for navigation because it is unique in representing north as up and south as down everywhere while preserving local directions and shapes. The map is thereby conformal. As a side effect, the Mercator projection inflates the size of objects away from the equator. This inflation is very small near the equator but accelerates with increasing latitude to become infinite at the poles.
In navigation, a rhumb line, rhumb (rʌm), or loxodrome is an arc crossing all meridians of longitude at the same angle, that is, a path with constant bearing as measured relative to true north. The effect of following a rhumb line course on the surface of a globe was first discussed by the Portuguese mathematician Pedro Nunes in 1537, in his Treatise in Defense of the Marine Chart, with further mathematical development by Thomas Harriot in the 1590s.
The Euclidean projection onto a convex set is an important problem that arises in numerous constrained optimization tasks. Unfortunately, in many cases, computing projections is computationally demand