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Gerardus Mercator: The Master of Maps
Navigate Your Way to One of History's Greatest Creators

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2012 marks the 500th birthday of Gerardus Mercator. If you’re saying “who?” you’re not alone. While his name might be lost to history, his way of thinking informs your everyday life in more ways than you can ever imagine.

Born in 1512, Gerardus Mercator is the father of the modern map. A renegade, who battled the church establishment, Mercator was accused of heresy for his innovative cartography designs.  

His history-changing breakthrough was known as the Mercator Projection, a map of the world, which had the unique ability to represent linear scale in a way that remained perfectly constant in all directions. This was Maps 2.0, a true technological leap that rivals the change from paper maps to Google maps.

These maps revolutionized navigation. For the first time sailors could plot a straight- line course over vast distances. It was from this discovery that laid the foundation for a plotting system that would one day evolve into GPS, the multi-satellite positioning system that is now used in everything from locating a missing pet, to finding a favorite restaurant, to coordinating military operations and even in pinpointing cancerous cells in the human body.

A skilled engraver and talented calligrapher, Mercator’s maps were not only functional technological marvels but stunning works of art. Not surprisingly his artistic influence has as great a reach as his technological innovations. The contemporary art world is filled with artists who are using maps in their work.  Artists like late Italian conceptual artist Alighiero e Boetti whose Mappa series was a group of large embroidered maps of the world woven by master Afghan weavers. French artist Elisabeth Lecourt has made the maps wearable by constructing dresses made of paper maps of London, New York and Paris. Matthew Cusick makes delicately beautiful collages out of old maps and geography textbooks.  These are only a handful of the growing number of artists who see the map as something to explore.

Mercator was a relentless seeker of truth and 500 years after his birth he might have been pleased to discover that maps have become not merely a device in which we plot a path to a location but a realm in which we try to discover who we are. 

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