Just to round out/add to some of the previous posts about maps: On Monday, I heard this story on NPR “All Things Considered” about the death of cartographer Arthur Robinson, who died in October at the age of 89. According to the report, Robinson’s major contribution to the field of cartography was redesigning world maps in order to put the size of places like Greenland and Alaska in proportion, which get distorted all the time because of cartographers trying to account for the curve of the earth. “All Things Considered” interviewed one of Robinson’s students (he was a professor at the University of Wisconsin) who explained that Robinson changed the way cartographers thought about map making to account for the “look” of a map– the colors, the proportion of different geographic regions, etc. Interesting stuff.
Writer, Professor, and Everything Else