History of Maps, Part 1

A Brief Who's Who and What's What of Maps and Mapping

George F. Jenks: Jenks' accomplishments are not as well recognized by the internet community as the next three men on this list, but from what I was able to deduce he derived new methods for showing maps on the computer. His paper "The Data Model Concept in Statistical Mapping" introduced the "Jenks Optimization Method," the particulars of which I am sure I will become more familiar with as the semester goes on.

Erwin Raisz: Raisz wrote the book on cartography. Literally, his General Cartography (1938) was the first published textbook on cartography. In doing so, he introduced the world to the "language" of cartography. By describing landforms as "orthoapsidal" or "armadillo," he gave us the vocabulary and map skills to adequately define and describe what we were wanting to map.

John Paul Goode: Goode developed a new world map that attempted to eliminate the area distortions that were present at the poles on older versions of world maps. His map, called a Homolosine projection because it combined the homolographic and sinusoidal projections, converged the two at the latitude where the scales were the same, and then merged the two there.

Waldo Tobler: An influential figure in cartography. Tobler is a Swiss-American who currently holds a teaching position in the Department of Geography at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He was awarded a honoris causa from the University of Zurich in 1988 for his lifetime work in cartography. His main contribution to geography is the idea that "everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related to each other." This is known as the First Law of Geography.






A Note on Maps: Did you know that the earliest known map was made by the Babylonians almost 8,000 years ago? If you are interested and would like to know more about this, click here, or here, or even here, but not here. And, for the love of God, whatever you do, don't click here.