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Gerardus Mercator (March 5, 1512 - December 2, 1594) was a Flemish cartographer. He was born Gerard de gemor or de Cremer (Mercator is the Latinized form of his name). Mercator's map-making began when he produced a map of Palestine in 1537. In 1538 he produced a map of the world and a map of Flanders in 1540. He was appointed Court Cosmographer to Wilhelm, Duke of JÌ_lich-Cleves-Berg in 1564. He constructed a new chart and first used it in 1569. The Mercator projection is a cylindrical map projection. It became the standard map projection for nautical purposes because of its ability to represent lines of constant course, known as rhumb lines or loxodromes, as straight segments. While the linear scale is equal in all directions around any point, thus preserving the angles and the shapes of small objects (which makes the projection conformal), the Mercator projection distorts the size and shape of large objects, as the scale increases from the Equator to the poles, where it becomes infinite. In 1570 Mercator took the word atlas to describe a collection of maps, and encouraged Abraham Ortelius to compile the first modern world atlas, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum. He produced his own atlas in a number of parts, the first of which was published in 1578. He died in 1594 at the age of 82.
