Mercator's Maps

Weekend Edition Saturday:

He was born 500 years ago in Flanders, studied astronomy and mathematics, and drew his first major world map in 1538. He was imprisoned for heresy in 1544 — the charge probably had more to do with his Protestantism than science — but he was released after seven months and later moved to Duisburg.
Before Mercator, maps were often acts of imagination. Some mapmakers put in a Heaven above all that looked as detailed as the Seven Hills of Rome. Many drew dragons and serpents in uncharted places. Maps depicted hopes, and fears appeared almost as much as rivers and mountains.
But Mercator took into account sightings made on the great voyages of discovery of Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama and Ferdinand Magellan. He made dragons into decorations, and drew curves into continents that suggested the way they stretched across an Earth that men were beginning to know — from experience and observation, not just theory — was not flat. He figured out math to depict the curves of the Earth as straight lines, so that sailors could plot courses.
Mercator's maps were highly imperfect, to be sure, drawn of a world that Europeans had only fractionally explored by the mid-16th century. But they were maps as we understand the term now. They could guide travelers from Point A to Point B, from Flanders to the Papal States. They could steer mariners from Europe to the New World. People could unroll Mercator's maps and hold a picture of the world in their hands, and open windows in their minds.

Old time math discoveries amaze me.  I don't really understand the math today, let alone inventing the stuff.