The Mercator projection of the world map is suited for marine navigation and once so commonplace that generations of schoolchildren thought Greenland was as large as Africa. Though out of fashion ...

Even if you've never seen Gerardus Mercator, you've almost certainly seen his work. His Mercator projection map, invented in 1569, was the primary map that navigators used for years.

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.

Centuries of flawed maps have led to a misconception about Greenland 's size, which is nowhere near as big as it looks on the familiar flat world map.

Whether you’ve realized it or not, all of the maps that you are used to seeing are distorted. The most common map is the Mercator projection map, which was created by Flemish geographer and ...

Mercator’s map was so useful to sailors that its popularity eventually caught on with landlubbers. Today, it’s still the most often used map projection in the world.

I thought because mercator projections are rectangular, I can just use a simple percentage of lat/lon to calculate the x/y position of points on the map, which is what I'm trying to do.

The map is most suitable for local area mapping and is used by digital platforms like Google Maps. When enlarged into a world map, though, Mercator becomes problematic, Braun said.

Many of the maps we use today are based on a solution created by Gerardus Mercator, a Flemish geographer. In 1569 he drew a world map, what's become known as the Mercator projection.

The Mercator map was intended as a navigational tool for European mariners, who could draw a straight line from Point A to Point B and find their bearings with little trouble.