Cartography

The 50 people who gathered Saturday at Cal State Northridge had one thing in common: All are mad about maps. The campus was the site of the 40th general meeting of the California Map Society, an organization of 165 members devoted to the preservation and celebration of maps. This year, there is much to celebrate. As members explained, cartography, or the making of maps, has undergone a revolution in the last decade.

Leonhard Euler, a Swiss mathematician who continued to work on complex equations from memory even after he went blind, is honored in Monday's Google Doodle on the 306th anniversary of his birth. Euler, who wrote nearly 900 books over the course of his career on topics such as lunar motion, optics, acoustics, algebra, calculus, geometry and number theory, is one of the most prolific and important mathematicians of the 18th century, and possibly of all time. He was so prolific that a St. Petersburg, Russia, academy continued to publish his unpublished works for at least 30 years after his death in 1783.

Cypress College can't train enough people to fill the job openings, and it can't find enough instructors to teach the subject, either. The field of geographic information systems--using computers to combine sophisticated data with layers of colorful maps--is sizzling on university campuses.

Like some other recent Nobel literary laureates, Mario Vargas Llosa, the prolific Peruvian novelist, essayist and playwright and former center-right presidential candidate, has been known as much for his controversial political views as for his books. But Vargas Llosa's politics, like his ironic fiction, are not easily typecast. As a critic of both right- and left-wing authoritarianism, the 74-year-old author has expressed his wariness of utopian thinking, populist cults of personality and the notion that flawed human beings are capable of building an earthly paradise.

Leonhard Euler, a Swiss mathematician who continued to work on complex equations from memory even after he went blind, is honored in Monday's Google Doodle on the 306th anniversary of his birth. Euler, who wrote nearly 900 books over the course of his career on topics such as lunar motion, optics, acoustics, algebra, calculus, geometry and number theory, is one of the most prolific and important mathematicians of the 18th century, and possibly of all time. He was so prolific that a St. Petersburg, Russia, academy continued to publish his unpublished works for at least 30 years after his death in 1783.

Cabdriver Yahya Said could have used a map to help navigate through his confusion Saturday outside Union Station in downtown Los Angeles. The 28-year-old taxi driver was thumbing through the latest edition of the Thomas Guide, considered the bible of street directories in a town that worships automobile travel. And a strange feeling was coming over him. The Biltmore Hotel wasn't where it should have been. Neither was Los Angeles International Airport or West Hollywood or anything else.

A new, more accurate view of the world has been adopted by the National Geographic Society. After more than half a century of using the Van der Grinten projection for world maps, the society is changing to the projection of cartographer Arthur H. Robinson. The new map overcomes some of the problems of transforming the Earth's round surface to a flat one, and countries more closely match their relative size.

Your story "Portugal May Have Put America on the Map" (Oct. 6) not only has Magellan as the first European to have officially sighted the Pacific (it was Balboa) but also repeats an old idea as if it were completely new: that an unknown Portuguese explorer ventured as far north as present-day Acapulco up the west side of the Americas, that this was kept "secret" for reasons of state by the Portuguese but that somehow the German cartographer Martin Waldseemueller incorporated this "discovery" into his world map of 1507.

Arve Henriksen : If you're thirsty for surprising sounds and quietly evocative mood music, look up this sonic explorer from Norway. Imagine Miles Davis remaking "In a Silent Way" inside a snow cave and you have some idea of where this trumpeter's atmospheric ECM release "Cartography" is coming from. There may not be a traditional jazz groove, but if you follow where Henriksen leads, you won't miss it. "Being Human": The premise for this BBC America series sounds like a bad "SNL" sketch -- a ghost, a werewolf and a vampire share an apartment.

Geography professors expecting to find a new admirer in science writer Stephen S. Hall will be surprised and probably none too pleased. In this survey of modern cartography, Hall finds counterparts to intrepid explorers such as Columbus and Magellan not in today's financially embattled geography departments but among the scientists and mathematicians who are using computer graphics to represent and analyze the frontiers of knowledge.

Arve Henriksen : If you're thirsty for surprising sounds and quietly evocative mood music, look up this sonic explorer from Norway. Imagine Miles Davis remaking "In a Silent Way" inside a snow cave and you have some idea of where this trumpeter's atmospheric ECM release "Cartography" is coming from. There may not be a traditional jazz groove, but if you follow where Henriksen leads, you won't miss it. "Being Human": The premise for this BBC America series sounds like a bad "SNL" sketch -- a ghost, a werewolf and a vampire share an apartment.

CHICAGO -- To Inuits in the late 1800s, a map was a piece of wood with carved gnarls and pocks representing the coastal inlets of Greenland. To ancient Greeks and early Europeans, maps were flights of fancy and horror, showing beautiful beasts and savage humans of uncharted lands. Eighteenth-century Buddhists saw maps as moral charts juxtaposing landscapes of men's sensual desires and "infinite space."

Some transit advocates attend meetings. Others write letters. Some even picket outside subway stations. Numan Parada makes maps. At a time when a subway-to-the-sea along Wilshire Boulevard is still far from a reality, he is plotting it on a map anyway. With the click of a mouse, he puts a notch next to the Getty Center on the rail line he envisions branching off Wilshire Boulevard to follow the 405 Freeway corridor to the San Fernando Valley. "That's a good place for a station," he said.

When some of the first maps were printed in the late 15th century, they were simple diagrams of three continents and one giant ocean. Over the next several centuries, more continents were added as European explorers traveled to the Americas, circumnavigated the southern part of Africa and reached southern and eastern parts of Asia. Technological and scientific gains meant more thorough drawings that incorporated information about the Earth's interior and ocean floor.

"EVERYTHING happens somewhere" would be a good motto for the Ordnance Survey, Britain's premier mapmaker since 1791 and now a leader in computerized map resources and their astounding 21st century applications. The organization, a self-funded agency of the British government, devotes itself to improving modern life through the use of maps and stands as proof that the study of geography is alive and well -- in England, at least. Americans who have heard of the Ordnance Survey (www.ordnancesurvey.

Shane Henry steered his truck along a dusty road, emerging from a steep, cool pine forest and dead-ending on the edge of a precipice. The uncharted spot provided a breathtaking, 30-mile-wide panoramic view of the Virgin River Gorge, stretching northeast into Utah. For Henry, a field cartographer for the Automobile Club of Southern California, it was a great day of discovery. After finding the overlook, he spotted ruins of a forgotten century-old cattle ranch near a pair of freshwater springs.

"EVERYTHING happens somewhere" would be a good motto for the Ordnance Survey, Britain's premier mapmaker since 1791 and now a leader in computerized map resources and their astounding 21st century applications. The organization, a self-funded agency of the British government, devotes itself to improving modern life through the use of maps and stands as proof that the study of geography is alive and well -- in England, at least. Americans who have heard of the Ordnance Survey (www.ordnancesurvey.

The 50 people who gathered at Cal State Northridge on Saturday had one thing in common: All are mad about maps. The campus was the site of the 40th general meeting of the California Map Society, an organization of 165 members devoted to the preservation and celebration of maps. This year, there is much to celebrate. As members explained, cartography, or the making of maps, has undergone a revolution in the past decade.

David A. Woodward, a noted maps historian and professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has died. He was 61. Woodward died Aug. 25 from cancer of the bile duct and diabetes. Woodward was born Aug. 29, 1942, in Royal Leamington Spa, England, and earned degrees from the University of Wales Swansea and the University of Wisconsin.

Your story "Portugal May Have Put America on the Map" (Oct. 6) not only has Magellan as the first European to have officially sighted the Pacific (it was Balboa) but also repeats an old idea as if it were completely new: that an unknown Portuguese explorer ventured as far north as present-day Acapulco up the west side of the Americas, that this was kept "secret" for reasons of state by the Portuguese but that somehow the German cartographer Martin Waldseemueller incorporated this "discovery" into his world map of 1507.