For those who only know the name Mercator through the controversial map projection that bears his name, historian Andrew Taylor has done a great service. In “The World of Gerard Mercator,” Taylor has ...

The flat world map we normally see is made by the Mercator projection, which is a cylindrical map projection developed by cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569. While the linear scale is equal in all ...

Visualize the world map. You’re probably imagining the Mercator projection, the standard used across American schools. Unfortunately, that map is wrong: It’s a variation of Gerardus Mercator’s design ...

Picture a wall-size world map. What do you see? What you are imagining is most likely not the type of map going into Boston Public Schools Thursday. Social studies teachers in the second, seventh and ...

Forty years ago, a German historian named Arno Peters published a world map that he described as a rebuttal to four centuries of faulty cartographic thinking. Peters believed that too much modern ...

On a typical world map, Canada is a vast nation. Home to six time zones, its endless plains spread from ocean to ocean, dominating great swathes of the northern half of the globe. But, in reality, ...

The Mercator world map, long a fixture in classrooms globally, makes the European Union appear almost as large as Africa. In reality, Africa is more than seven times bigger. It is a distortion that ...

Try to wrap a football in aluminium foil and you will discover that you have to crumple up the foil to make it fit snugly to the ball. In the same way it is impossible to represent the curved surface ...

Geradus Mercator was the first person to use the word atlas to describe a book of maps. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images) Google has marked the birthday of 16th century cartographer Gerard Mercator, who ...