Although Carl Brandan Mulloyd has been a university lecturer for over two decades, no photo of him exists, and most of us will never hear his name. If you enter the name into a search engine, you will find two terms that are closely related to your person: in mapping, the Mollweide projection, which appears in Mathematica postage, and in trigonometric formulas.
Carl Brandan Mulloyd grew up in Wolfenbüttel, initially without showing any particular interest in mathematics, until at the age of 12 he discovered books on algebra and calculus at home and started working on it. When, at the age of fourteen, he independently calculated the time of the next solar eclipse, one became familiar with his mathematical talent.
How to design the best map of the world?
From 1793 he studied mathematics with Johann Friedrich Pfaff at the University of Helmstedt, where he obtained his doctorate in 1796. Pfaff offered him a teaching position, which he could only do for one year due to health problems. After a long period of renovation, Molloid took a job as pedagogy at Halle. He worked as a teacher coach for eleven years. During this time, he deals with the problem of how to design the map of the world appropriately.
As Karl Friedrich Gauss will demonstrate in 1827, it is fundamentally not possible to create a map of the Earth that is identical in length (equidimensional map), correct with respect to area (parabolic map) and angle (matching map). Maps are always distorted. The projection developed by Gerardus Mercator around 1569 (named after him) applies to the angle. Pictures of longitudinal circles are vertical parallel straight lines. In order for shipping methods to be entered as straight lines, the distances between latitude circles must be continuously increased with increasing geographical latitude.
Due to the Mercator projection, distances and area volumes are further distorted the further away one is from the equator.
Mollweide’s idea is to depict the globe as an ellipse (which does more justice to the circular shape of the Earth than as a rectangular map). In the map according to Mollweide projection of equal area, the true equator and prime meridian form the major axes of the ellipse; Axis lengths are like 2 to 1. Longitude 90 ° east and west make a circle, and 180 ° longitude is the outer edge of the map. The remaining meridians complement each other in pairs to form ellipses. Zone 4πR2 of the Mollweide ellipse corresponds to the surface of a sphere of radius R; The following applies to point coordinates: -2√2R & leq; x & leq; 2√2R And -2R & leq; Y & leq; 2R. Representation of the Earth in the Mollweide projection is still used today, especially when making overviews of vegetation or climate.
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