Mercator
Noun
Meaning
Flemish geographer who lived in Germany; he invented the Mercator projection of maps of the globe (1512-1594)
Source: WordNetSynonyms
Phrases with the word
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Examples
Happiest day of my life, was when the Defense Department took down its Mercator... I started learning how to make maps while on an Army payroll. So getting to see mine in the Pentagon, flanked by generals, is a little like being a prophet who is finally honored by his hometown.
A Mercator map can therefore never fully show the polar areas (as long as the projection is based on a cylinder centered on the Earth’s rotation axis; see the Transverse Mercator projection for another application).
Arno Peters stirred controversy when he proposed what is now usually called the Gall–Peters projection as the alternative to the Mercator.
Because the linear scale of a Mercator map increases with latitude, it distorts the size of geographical objects far from the equator and conveys a distorted perception of the overall geometry of the planet.
At latitudes greater than 70° north or south the Mercator projection is practically unusable, since the linear scale becomes infinitely high at the poles.
Following Mercator, Abraham Ortelius also showed BEACH and LVCACH in these locations on his world map of 1571.