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Mercator projection

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Mercator Projection

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Mercator projection

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The Man Behind Mercator Projections - Stuff of Genius

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World Mercator Projection with country going to be true size

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Mercator Projections: Where did they come from? | Stuff of Genius

The Mercator projection is a cylindrical map projection presented by the Flemish geographer and cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569. It became the standard map projection for nautical purposes because of its ability to represent lines of constant course, known as rhumb lines or loxodromes, as straight segments that conserve the angles with the meridians. Although the linear scale is equal in all directions around any point, thus preserving the angles and the shapes of small objects, the Mercator projection distorts the size of objects as the latitude increases from the Equator to the poles, where the scale becomes infinite. So, for example, landmasses such as Greenland and Antarctica appear much larger than they actually are relative to land masses near the equator, such as Central Africa.
    • History 

    • Properties 

    • Uses 

    • Mathematics of the Mercator projection