9 min readNew DelhiSep 10, 2026 12:27 PM IST First published on: Sep 10, 2026 at 12:27 PM IST
Last week, the UN General Assembly voted to replace Mercator’s world map with one that reflects Africa’s size more accurately. Since 1569, the Mercator projection—a map design by Flemish geographer Gerardus Mercator—has been the subject of heated debate, particularly over the distortions it introduces in the size of countries and continents. In A History of the World in 12 Maps (2012), “Throughout his long life, his travels never took him further than a 200 kilometre radius away from his birthplace of Rupelmonde, a small town on the bank of the River Scheldt in the modern-day Belgian region of East Flanders, where he was born in 1512 and named Gerard Kremer [or Gerardus Mercator].” When he laid out his famous world projection in 1569, at the age of 57, he had produced fewer than ten maps.
