Gerard Mercator
War dead Male Born 1512 Died 1594
Geographer. Born Flanders, son of a poor cobbler. "Mercator" is the Latin translation of his name, Gerard Kremer. He invented a means of projecting the spherical world onto a flat sheet of paper and was the first to name a book of maps an "Atlas". He was over 50 when he published the first "Mercator projection" and over 70 when he published the first Atlas. So not an infant prodigy.
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