MATHEMATICS AND MAP DRAWING IN THE

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

ATHANASE PAPADOPOULOS

Abstract. We consider the mathematical theory of geographical

maps, with an emphasis on the eighteenth century works of Euler,
Lagrange and Delisle. This period is characterized by the frequent
use of maps that are no more obtained by the stereographic pro-
jection or its variations, but by much more general maps from the
sphere to the plane. More especially, the characteristics of the
desired geographical maps were formulated in terms of an appro-
priate choice of the images of the parallels and meridians, and the
mathematical properties required by the map concern the distor-
tion of the maps restricted to these lines. The paper also contains
some notes on the general use of mathematical methods in carto-
graphy in Greek Antiquity and in the modern period, and on the
mutual influence of the two fields, mathematics and geography.
The final version of this paper appeared in Gan.ita Bhārātı̄(Indian
mathematics), Vol. 41, No. 1-2, 2019, p. 91-126. .
AMS Mathematics Subject Classification: 01A55, 30C20, 53A05, 53A30,
91D20.
Keywords: Geographical map, cartography, sphere projection, geography,
astronomy, Ptolemy’s geography, Leonhard Euler, Joseph-Nicolas Delisle,
Joseph-Louis Lagrange.

Contents
1. Introduction 1
2. Cartography in Antiquity 5
3. Joseph-Nicolas Delisle 9
4. Euler’s writings on Delisle’s method 14
5. Euler as a geographer 18
6. Lagrange 20
7. A glimpse of later developments 23
References 27

1. Introduction
Cartography, or the art of drawing geographical maps, as it reached us, is
rooted in the works of mathematicians of Greek Antiquity. It has close con-
nections with geometry and astronomy. The Greek geographers of Antiquity

Date: 19th November 2021.

1
2 ATHANASE PAPADOPOULOS

that we shall mention considered the Earth as a spherical body, and they
were able to carry out computations of large distances on its surface using
methods of spherical geometry, in particular, of formulae making relations
between the three sides of spherical triangles1 and between angles and sides
of such triangles, that is, spherical trigonometry (even though the expression
was not used yet). Spherical geometry was also used in astronomy, since the
heavenly sphere was, like the Earth, assimilated to a sphere.2 Furthermore,
geographers from Antiquity realized that it was possible to measure large
distances on the surface of the Earth by methods involving the study of
the positions of stars and of distances between them. Thus, they developed
methods for measuring distances between two distant locations on the sur-
face of the Earth using their knowledge in astronomy. The illustration in
Figure 1 is extracted from a 15th century byzantine manuscript of a copy
of Ptolemy’s influential work, the Geography. It represents the author, with
the index of his right hand pointing to the Small Bear constellation, while
measuring, with his left hand, angles between the stars, using a quadrant,
a compass and a plumb-line, and dictating the corresponding distances on
the surface of the Earth to another man, dressed as a medieval geographer,
whose task is to mark the latitudes on a World map. On the visible face
of this map are represented the three known continents, Europe, Asia and
Africa. The two systems of lines on the sphere represented on this World
map are the parallels and the meridians. They will be an important ele-
ment of discussion in the present paper. The two grids that consist of a
selection of (images of) meridians and longitudes that are represented on a
geographical map are usually called graticules.
In this paper, instead of graticules we shall consider the complete sys-
tems of lines, and we shall take the liberty of using modern mathematical
terminology, calling the parallels and the meridians foliations of the sphere
(with two singular points each, at the North and South poles). The im-
ages of these foliations by a geographical map are foliations of the Euclidean
domain which is the image of this map. The leaves of the first foliation
are the parallels of the surface of the globe representing the Earth, that is,
they are small circles obtained as the intersection of the sphere with planes
parallel to the one containing the equator. The latter is a great circle (the
intersection of the sphere with a plane passing through its center) which is
perpendicular to the rotation axis of the sphere; it constitutes the separ-
ation line between the so-called Northern and Southern hemispheres. The
parallels are the equidistant lines to the equator. The leaves of the second
foliation are the meridians, viz. the half-great circles perpendicular to the
equator (or, equivalently, the half-great circles connecting the North and
South poles). The foliations by meridians and parallels are perpendicular to

1We recall that a spherical triangle, unlike a Euclidean one, is completely de-
termined by its three angles. Thus, there are formulae giving the length of a side
in terms of the angles. This fact was known to the Greek geometers. An important
treatise on spherical triangles is Menelaus’ Spherics (1st-2nd c. BCE), see [48].
2The radius of that sphere was irrelevant, and it could also be considered as
infinite, since the distance between two stars was taken to be the angle they make
from the observer’s viewpoint.
 MATHEMATICS AND MAP DRAWING IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 3

Figure 1. The first page of a copy of a manuscript of

Ptolemy’s Cosmographia. Constantinople, end of XVth cen-
tury. Bibliothèque Nationale de France. (Department of ma-
nuscripts, Codex Greek No. 1401 fol. 2.).

each other. The images of these foliations by the geographical map may or
may not be perpendicular, depending on the map.
Using these two systems of curves, the position of an arbitrary point on
the surface of the Earth is usually determined by two coordinates: (1) the
latitude, which is the distance from this point to the equator, or, equivalently,
the distance to the equator of the parallel on which the point lies; (2) the
longitude, which is the angle made by the meridian passing through the given
point and a fixed reference meridian. Here, the angle made by two meridians
is the dihedral angle made by the two planes containing them. Longitudes
are taken between 0 and π, with the following convention: the longitude is
called Eastern or Western according to whether the given point is at the East
or West of the chosen reference meridian. Ptolemy used extensively these
coordinates in his Geography. He took the reference meridian to be the one
passing through his city, Alexandria, which in those times was a world major
center of knowledge. Figure 2 is a representation of a celestial globe dating
from the 1st century BCE which is reduced to its most elementary elements:
the foliations by parallels and meridians. The same picture could have been
used for the representation of the Earth.
4 ATHANASE PAPADOPOULOS

Let us stress on the fact that whereas meridians are geodesics on the
sphere, parallels are not. The degrees of latitude are proportional to dis-
tances on the sphere, by a factor which does not depend on the chosen
meridian, whereas the degrees of longitude are not proportional to distances.
The geometers from ancient Greece knew that it is not possible to have
a faithful representation of (part of) a sphere on a Euclidean plane. This
follows immediately from properties of spherical triangles, e.g. the fact that
angle sum is not constant, or from other the properties that make these
triangles very different from the Euclidean ones. One of the themes that
I will stress in this paper is that drawing a geographical map while taking
into account this impossibility was reduced to the question of drawing in an
appropriate way the images of the foliations by parallels and by meridians.
This simple remark, which in a sense is an obvious one, turned out to be
of paramount importance. It was formulated explicitly in the 18th century,
and it was at the center of the researches of Lambert, Euler, Lagrange and
others. We shall discuss this in the work of Lagrange, in §6 below.

Figure 2. Celestial globe with the two perpendicular foli-

ations by parallels and meridians. Wall painting fragment
from the peristyle of the Villa of P. Fannius Synistor at
Boscoreale (Province of Naples), ca. 50-40 BCE. The frag-
ment is exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York, Department of Greek and Roman Art. (Photo A.
Papadopoulos.)

The rest of this paper is divided into 6 sections, the main ones being
Sections 3 to 6. They concern the 18th century activity on mathematical
 MATHEMATICS AND MAP DRAWING IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 5

map drawing. We shall review there the works of Delisle, Euler and Lagrange
and a few others. Before that, in Section 2, we shall make an overview of
the work done before this period, mainly by Ptolemy, and we shall use ideas
from there in our account of 18th-century cartography. The last section of
this paper, Section 7, contains some perspectives and concluding remarks.
While surveying the works of geographers and map drawers that are well-
known mathematicians (Ptolemy, Euler, Lambert Lagrange, etc.), we in-
cluded a minimal amount of biographical elements concerning them. But
we thought it was useful to include some more information on the life of
Joseph-Nicolas Delisle, a famous astronomer and geographer at the Saint
Petersburg Academy of Sciences with whom Euler collaborated on carto-
graphy, assuming that his name is poorly known to mathematicians.
An extended analysis of mathematical geography of the eighteenth cen-
tury is made in the book [5].
In this paper, the translations from the French are mine.

2. Cartography in Antiquity
Cartography is a field of practical importance in which advanced math-
ematics was needed, and I will start by a few words of motivation on this
subject.
In Ancient times, the drawing of geographical maps, besides its theoretical
importance for the advancement of knowledge, was motivated by practical
questions. Maps were useful to travelers, explorers, traders, adventurers
and navigators. The making of geographical maps was sponsored by polit-
ical rulers who needed to have precise representations of the provinces they
controlled. Maps were also useful to land owners, for tax and inheritance
purposes. Geographical maps were also used by conquerors and generals,
who needed to have an image of the lands they intended to overmaster, and
by others who were simply curious to know the scope of the known inhabited
and uninhabited world. For the cultured man, skimming geographical maps
would show that the community or country to which he belonged was not
the only one on Earth. We may recall here a dialogue by Claudius Aelianus
(ca. 175-ca. 235) in which this Roman author relates a conversation between
Socrates and the Athenian statesman Alcibiades: The philosopher, seeing
the excessive pride that his interlocutor took from the extent of the land
he controlled, showed him a World map and asked him to find the place of
Attica. When Alcibiades found the place, Socrates continued: “Now show
me the lands you own.” Alcibiades responded that they were not marked on
the map. Socrates then told him: “How can you be so proud of properties
which do not represent even a point on Earth!” [1, Book II, chap. 28]
Among the many Greek mathematicians who were thoroughly involved
in geography, and in particular in map drawing, we mention Autolycus of
Pitane (4th c. BCE), whose work, On the moving sphere, on astronomical
phenomena, is the oldest Greek mathematical treatise which completely sur-
vives, Eratosthenes of Cyrene (3rd c. BCE), whose name is associated with
a measure of the length of an Earth meridian, Hipparchus of Nicaea (2nd
c. BCE), who is the first known mathematician who discovered formulae
of spherical trigonometry and who used them for establishing astronomical
6 ATHANASE PAPADOPOULOS

tables, Posidonius of Apamea (2nd c. BCE), who carried out a measure

of distances from the Earth to the Moon and other large distances, and
the great Claudius Ptolemy (3rd c. CE), whose Geography [47], which we
mentioned above, marks the climax of the Greek contribution to the named
field. In this work, Ptolemy, besides compiling the main achievements of his
predecessors and correcting them, used all the mathematical, optical and
astronomical tools that were at his disposal in order to give the most pos-
sible precise indications that were useful for drawing geographical maps of
the known world. The prominent 18th–19th century French scientist Pierre-
Simon de Laplace, in a passage of his major work Exposition of the system
of the world, in which he explains the importance of geography in the sci-
ences, attributes to Hipparchus the method of computing the coordinates of
locations on the Earth by their latitude and longitude using astronomical
data, namely, the eclipses of the moon. In the same passage, Laplace recalls
that Hipparchus’ works did not reach us because they were destroyed with
the fatal burning of the library of Alexandria, and that we know these works
only through those of Ptolemy [36, vol. 2, p. 505].
Like his predecessors, Ptolemy used, for his computations of distances
on the Earth, theoretical methods involving a comparison between arcs of
circles on the Celestial sphere with corresponding arcs of circles on the sur-
face of the Earth. From the philosophical point of view, this possibility of
computing the earthly distances from their counterparts on the Celestial
sphere, which combines astronomy and geography into one single field of
investigation, was a ground for Ptolemy’s (and before him, of Hipparchus’,
Eratosthenes’ and others’) belief that the whole universe is one single body.
By the end of Book II of his major book on Astronomy, the Almagest,
after establishing his well-known tables of the coordinates of the celestial
remarkable places, Ptolemy writes: “This table of angles should be followed
by the locations of the most famous cities, according to their longitudes and
latitudes, computed according to the celestial phenomena that are observed
in each of these cities. But we shall treat distinctly this interesting subject
which belongs to geography [. . . ] [46, t. 1 p. 148].” Thus, Ptolemy kept
his word, since he included his astronomical observations as a major tool
in the computation the geographical coordinates that he published in his
Geography.
Ptolemy had at his disposal the formulae for spherical triangles that were
discovered a few decades earlier by Menelaus of Alexandria. He was also
aware of the mathematical properties of two types of projections: the one
onto a plane passing through the center of the sphere and the one onto a
plane tangent to the sphere, both centered at an intersection point between
the sphere and a diameter perpendicular to that plane.
We already mentioned that in our discussion of geographical maps, an
important factor will be the images of the parallels and the meridians. Let us
note, as a preliminary observation, two special cases: Under a stereographic
projection centered at the North pole, the parallels are sent to concentric
circles centered at the image of the South pole, while the meridians are
sent to straight lines meeting at this image. Another projection, called the
gnomonic projection and which was known since the times of Thales, has a
 MATHEMATICS AND MAP DRAWING IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 7

similar property. This is a projection from the center of the sphere onto a
plane tangent to the South pole. Under this projection, parallels are sent
to circles centered at the South pole and meridians are sent to straight lines
passing through the South pole.
In the first book of the Geography, Ptolemy discusses the mathematical
methods that his predecessors used for drawing geographical maps and ex-
plains how these methods can be improved. Half of his treatise (in number
of pages) is dedicated to tables of coordinates of known places; he indicates
there about 8000 names of locations, from Ireland in the West to China
in the East, each with its coordinates, expressed in degrees and minutes of
latitudes and longitudes. This work also includes descriptions of several big
rivers, with the location of their sources and a specification of their form
(curvature, etc.). Regarding India, Ptolemy indicates 270 locations, giving
also the duration of the longest day for 30 cities in this country. The last
book of the Geography contains instructions for map drawing (10 maps for
Europe, 4 for Africa and 12 for Asia).
During the Middle Ages, Ptolemy’s Geography was translated into Arabic
by the mathematician al-Khwārizmı̄, and later, into Latin, from the Arabic.
One may also mention here that Ptolemy wrote another geographical work,
known in Latin as the Planisphaerum, which reached us only through Arabic
translations (the Latin version as well as all the subsequent versions were
translated from the Arabic; the Greek original is lost).
Ptolemy’s geographical maps did not survive but they were reconstructed
from the coordinates he gave, first by Byzantine monks at the end the 13th
century and later by geographers and artists, when his works reached the
Latin world. The first printed Greek version of the Geography was edited
by Erasmus in 1553. Figure 3 represents a map of the Known World (“Ecu-
mene”), from a 16th-century edition of this work. One may notice that
in this representation, the parallels and the meridians are perpendicular,
and that the parallels are circles whereas the meridians are not. We shall
thoroughly comment on such properties in the rest of the present paper.
Figure 4, reproduced from a 15th century edition of the Geography, repres-
ents a map of the Northern part of India. It carries the indication India extra
Gangem (India beyond the Ganges). The region depicted is bordered on the
West by the Ganges Delta and on the East by the land of Sinae (China). In
this map, the meridians and the parallels are straight lines. The map, from
a 15th century Latin manuscript of the Geography, was drawn according to
Ptolemy’s indications. On the right hand side of the picture are written the
names of the parallels and their latitudes.
It was well-known, since mathematicians understood the first properties
of spherical triangles, that it is not possible to draw maps from (a region
of) the sphere to the Euclidean plane that preserve distances up to scale.
In general, (images of) parallels and meridians are highlighted as significant
networks of lines on the drawing, and it was natural that geographers seek
for maps in which distances are preserved along these networks, or at least
along one of the them. In the next sections, we shall review the way in which
the 18th-century mathematicians-geographers dealt with such problems.
8 ATHANASE PAPADOPOULOS

Figure 3. Map of the Ecumene, or the “Known World”.

From a Latin translation of Ptolemy’s Geography. Translator
Girolamo Ruscello. Venice, around, 1564. Bodleian Libray,
University of Oxford, Collection of Medieval and Renaissance
Manuscript Illumination, Byw. H 5.9

To end this section, let us look at another map on which the foliations
of parallels and meridians are represented in a peculiar way. This is the
16th-century heart-shaped map represented in Figure 5, carrying the name
Recens et integra orbis descriptio (Recent and complete description of the
world), drawn by the French mathematician and astronomer Oronce Fine
(1494–1555). The latter was the first to hold the chair of mathematics at
the Collège Royal (which became later the Collège de France). In this map,
the parallels constitute a foliation whose lines are close to circles near the
North Pole and to straight lines near the South Pole. The meridians are
everywhere almost perpendicular to the images of the parallels. Distances
along the parallels and along the central meridian are preserved up to scaling.
Such a projection is also known under the name Stabius–Werner projection,
in honor of two cartographers, Johannes Stabius (1460–1522), who was the
first to highlight it, and Johannes Werner (1466–1528), who wrote a treatise
on it. Besides the remarkable properties that this geographical map satisfies
on the meridians and parallels, its shape has a practical advantage, namely,
it leaves in the dark the question of whether North America and Asia are
connected or not, a question whose response was unknown at that time. The
drawing of this map is also based on Ptolemy’s tables, and its conception
uses advanced spherical geometry and geometrical constructions combining
the stereographic and the gnomonic projections; see the discussion in [32].
We next pass to eighteenth century geography.
 MATHEMATICS AND MAP DRAWING IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 9

Figure 4. Map of the Northern part of India, from a Latin

edition of Ptolemy’s Geography. Translator Jacobus Angelus,
around 1485. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Department
of manuscripts. Latin No. 4804.

3. Joseph-Nicolas Delisle
We shall review in some detail the work of Joseph-Nicolas Delisle, and we
start with a few words on his life.
Born in Paris in 1688, Delisle was admitted in 1714 at the Royal Academy
of Sciences as a training astronomer. Soon afterwards, he published several
memoirs on astronomy and physics. In 1725, the tsar Peter the Great, who
was aware of Delisle’s talents, invited him officially to Saint Petersburg,
proposing him the post of director of the astronomical department at the
Academy of Sciences that he was planning to found in that city. Delisle
accepted and, a few months later, moved to Saint Petersburg. Louis the
14th , King of France, who died the same year, promised to Delisle that his
situation at the Royal Academy, as well as a position he had at the Collège
Royal, on a Chair of Mathematics, will be kept for him until his return.
Delisle founded an astronomical school in Saint Petersburg which be-
came, a few decades later, one of the most renowned in the world. He also
supervised the construction of an astronomical observatory of which he was
appointed the director, on the Vasilievsky island of Saint Petersburg. The
observatory is situated on the top three floors of the Kunstkamera. It be-
came soon one of the most famous in Europe. At the same time, Delisle was
in charge of the department of geography at the Academy. The principal
10 ATHANASE PAPADOPOULOS

Figure 5. A world map, drawn between 1534 and 1536 by

Oronce Fine, Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

task at this department was to make precise measurements of the territories

and to draw maps of the huge Russian Empire.
In 1736–1737, Delisle proposed, for the elaboration of a map of the Rus-
sian Empire, a general triangulation of these lands. Triangulations, for
measuring distances on the Celestial sphere, were already used in Antiquity
by Euclid, Heron and others, see e.g. [41, p. 845, 893.]. General maps
of France, the Netherlands and other European countries had already been
drawn using triangulations. This was the first time that Russia was submit-
ted to precise measurements using this method.
For that purpose, Delisle organized several expeditions to the various
parts of the Empire, from Central Asia to the remote frozen lands. Distances
between principal locations needed to be measured based on astronomical
observations. In his computations, Delisle took into account the fact that
the shape of the Earth is closer to a spheroid (a surface obtained by rotat-
ing an ellipse around an axis) than to a sphere. As a matter of fact, he
considered that the Earth is flattened at the Poles, following a hypothesis
emitted by Newton, which was in opposition to the theory emitted by the
Parisian geographers and astronomers under the leadership of the Cassinis
who thought that, on the contrary, the Earth is flattened at the Equator.
In 1737, Delisle read a paper on the triangulation of the Russian Empire
to the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences. The paper was translated
into English and published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
 MATHEMATICS AND MAP DRAWING IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 11

Society of London [13]. A short summary of this paper, highlighting a few

passages, may be useful to our subject:
In the introduction, Delisle expands on the necessity and exigencies of geo-
graphy, the drawing of charts and the measure of distances on the surface
of the Earth, and he recalls how this was dealt with at various stages of his-
tory, and how the need for more and more precise measurements arose. He
emphasizes the “immense labours of modern mathematicians” in this field,
mentioning the works of the mathematicians Fernel and Snellius, of the as-
tronomer Riccioli and others, who computed lengths of meridians based on
the laws of geometry and using astronomical observations. He stresses on
the importance of conducting such measurements at several locations and
comparing them. He recalls that there were contradictory conjectures on
the exact shape of the Earth: some scientists considered it as flattened at
the poles, and others at the equator. He gives some details on the units
of measurements used in Russia, comparing them with the French and the
English ones, explaining that what remains to do towards the perfection of
geography in Russia is to employ these units in actual measurements, “and
to construct the charts by the most exact methods of geometry, taking care
to set them down right, as to their true bearings, and to regulate them by
the most exact astronomical observations of longitude and latitude that can
possibly be made.” He then declares that it will not be possible to reach this
goal unless an equal and even greater work than that which has been un-
dertaken in France and elsewhere is undertaken, towards the measurement
of the Earth. He explains that this will be a long and painstaking process.
Setting in a proportionate way the degrees on the meridians and on the
longitudes should take into account the fact that the Earth is not perfectly
spherical. He writes: “In all this there might possibly arise an infinite vari-
ety, according to the figure the Earth might have; and as it is not yet decided
what is the Earth’s true figure, and that there is no better method of ascer-
taining it than by observations made in so great an extent as that of Russia.”
He then refers to the various experiments and the work done by Newton who
published them in his 1686 edition of the Principia, showing that the Earth
is flattened at the poles. He recalls that Huygens supported Newton but that
Picard, Snellius, Eisenschmid, the Cassinis (Giovanni-Domenico and his son
Jacques) and others refuted Newton’s claim and carried out measurements
that were supposed to prove that, on the contrary, the Earth is longer at
the poles. He also mentions the mathematician and astronomer Dortous de
Mairan who, in 1720, tried to reconcile the two points of view.
Delisle then recalls that back in 1720, while he was still in France, he
imagined a new method of tackling this question, by observing the degrees
of the parallel compared to those of the meridian. He explains his method
of measurement, and he points out the errors of the French, due to the fact
that the observations they made were not sufficient. This method consisted
in forming triangles based along the parallel of Paris and observing at the
two ends the difference of the meridians. He declares that at that time he
was not able to complete his design “for want of alliance and for reasons
which [he] shall pass in silence.”
12 ATHANASE PAPADOPOULOS

Delisle then explains the method of constructing maps of a large country

using triangles, in different directions, “linked together by means of objects
seen successively one from another”, and he describes the measurements
that Jacques Cassini undertook in 1733, which led to contradictory results,
because they were based on some error in the initial information on longit-
udes, due to some mistakes in the observation of Jupiter’s false satellite. He
recalls that it became clear that to draw correct maps of France, it was ne-
cessary to make observations in regions far from France, and that this gave
rise to the French expeditions to Peru, Lapland and other places, involving
astronomers and mathematicians. At the moment where Delisle was writing
his report, he was still not aware of the exact results of these expeditions.
Delisle then declares that in view of all this, he thought that it was neces-
sary to undertake a work of the same nature in Russia, with an advantage
that the other nations do not have, namely, the vast extent of the Russian
Empire in every direction. He then expands on where the vertices of the
triangles should be taken: generally, in open places where the ice is even or
where there are not trees, so that light signals that are used for indicating
the locations can be perceived from far away. He concludes his memoir by
describing several astronomical instruments that are needed for this task,
taking into account whether the sides of the triangles used in the measure-
ments terminate at places that are high or not with respect to the level of
the sea.
Delisle belonged to both departments at the Academy of Sciences, as-
tronomy and geography. These departments were part of the “class” of
mathematical Sciences, and Delisle had close relations with mathematicians.
During his first years in Saint Petersburg, he worked with Jakob Hermann,
who was, like him, a founding member of the Academy. Hermann was a
mathematician who, like Euler, came from Basel; incidentally, he was a rel-
ative of the Euler’s mother. In 1731, Hermann, who was 29 years older than
Euler, returned to Basel, and Delisle started to search for another math-
ematician who would assist him in his work, and the natural choice was
Euler.
When Euler and Delisle started their collaboration, in 1735, Euler was
already involved in astronomy. In 1732, he had presented to the Academy
a memoir titled Solutio problematis astronomici ex datis tribus stellae fixae
altitudinibus et temporum differentiis invenire elevationem poli et declin-
ationem stellae (Solution to problems of astronomy: given the altitudes and
time differences for three fixed stars, to find the elevation of the pole and
the declination of the stars) [15].3 In this memoir, Euler used spherical tri-
gonometry in order to solve the problem announced in the title; in fact, the
article starts with the spherical cosine formula in a triangle ABC:
cos BC − cos AB cos AC
cos A = .
sin AB sin AC
3Thememoir was published in 1735. Let us note that, in general, there was
a (sometimes very long) lapse of time of several years between the time when
Euler presented his memoirs and the time where they appeared in print. This was
essentially due to the large backlog that the journal of the Academy accumulated,
due to the amount of writings they received from Euler, who was extremely prolific.
 MATHEMATICS AND MAP DRAWING IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 13

In 1735, Euler presented another memoir on astronomy, titled De motu

planetarum et orbitarum determinatione (On the motion of planets and or-
bits) [16]. His collaboration with Delisle boosted his interest in the field,
and it was under the latter’s influence that he wrote his first book on astro-
nomy, Theoria motuum planetarum et cometarum (Theory of the motions
of planets and comets) [17] and his first important memoir on the motion of
the moon, Theoria motus lunae exhibens omnes eius inaequalitates (Theory
of the motion of the moon which exhibits all its irregularities) [19]. Euler
worked on topics related to the subjects of these two memoirs until the end
of his life. We shall talk more about Euler’s work on geography in §5 below.
The year 1740 saw the beginning of a conflict between Delisle and the
Academy’s administration. One reason was related to the so-called Atlas
Russicus (the “Russian Atlas”), a project which was initiated by Peter the
Great, and of which Delisle was in charge. Delisle kept postponing the pub-
lication of this atlas, and in 1740 this charge was taken away from him and
given to Euler, who became in effect the head of the department of geo-
graphy. To situate the problem in its context, one should remember the in-
ternational competition that was taking place in this period, for drawing and
publishing maps of Russia and the bordering countries (in particular China
and Japan). The monarchs, who were directly supervising the Academy,
were eager to see the atlas published.
Euler spent one year working on the atlas, in collaboration with the Ger-
man mathematician, geographer and astronomer Gottfried Heinsius who was
settled in Saint Petersburg, and without Delisle, until he moved to Berlin,
in June 1741. During his long stay in Berlin and until Delisle returned to
France, Euler kept informing the latter of his astronomical discoveries, and
in particular his researches on the moon. The correspondence between Euler
and Delisle during Euler’s stay in Berlin shows that each of the two men
had a high respect for each other’s work. Euler, from Berlin, continued to
follow the evolution of the atlas, whose direction was given to Heinsius. The
Atlas was eventually published in 1745. It consists of 20 maps.
Later, the situation between Euler and Delisle deteriorated. In a let-
ter to Johann Kaspar Wettstein,4 dated 5 June 1753 [24, p. 443], Euler
relates the criticism directed by Delisle towards the project the Russian At-
las that he was leading, writing that the latter was treating the project with
despise. In the same letter, Euler tells Wettstein that the Russians were un-
happy with Delisle’s memoir on the far-Eastern regions of Russia (“beyond
Kamchatka”), especially for what concerns lies and voluntary errors con-
tained in the latter’s memoir on the Kamchatka expedition (see the notes
in [24, p. 445 and 457]).
A short biography of Joseph-Nicolas Delisle is recorded in the memorial
article [26] by Jean-Paul Grandjean de Fouchy, astronomer and perpetual
secretary of the Paris Academy of Sciences, and as such, in charge of writing
the necrological articles about the members of this Academy. One may

4Johann Kaspar Wettstein (1695-1759) was, like Euler, from Basel, and the two
men were friends when they were young. Later, Wettstein moved to England where
he became chaplain to the royal family. Euler and Wettstein kept close relations.
14 ATHANASE PAPADOPOULOS

find other information on Delisle in his correspondence with Euler and with
various scientists.

4. Euler’s writings on Delisle’s method

In this section, we shall review two texts by Euler on Delisle’s method
of map drawing. The first text is extracted from the Atlas Geographicus
omnes orbis terrarum regiones in XLIV tabulis exhibens (Geographical at-
las representing in 44 maps all the regions of the Earth), published by the
Académie Royale des Sciences et Belles Lettres de Prusse, in Berlin, in the
year 1753 [20]. This atlas contains 44 maps, and it was edited under the
direction of Euler who also wrote the preface. Several projections are used
in drawing the maps of this atlas. It concerns only large parts of the Earth
globe: besides maps of the whole known world, it contains maps of regions
of the size of a country. All the projections used in drawing these maps sat-
isfy the following two properties: the meridians are perpendicular, or almost
perpendicular, to the parallels, and the degrees on longitudes are propor-
tional to the degrees of latitudes. It is mentioned on the cover page that
this atlas is principally meant for its usage in schools. We have reproduced,
in Figures 6 and 7, two maps from this atlas, one of Palestine, in which
the meridians and the parallels are straight lines, and one of the Northern
part of the Pacific, together with the regions from Asia (Eastern part of
Russia) and America that surround it, in which the parallels are circles and
the meridians are straight lines.
We translate part of the preface of the atlas, which concerns the map of
Figure 7, the last one in the series, which is drawn using Delisle’s method.
Euler, in this passage, comments on this method. The preface is dated
Berlin May 13, 1753. Euler writes:
In the description of this map, we have kept the method
which the famous Mr. Delisle used, which seems to us the
most appropriate for a good representation of these North-
ern regions. We have used the same method as in the general
map of the Russian Empire published by the Saint Peters-
burg Academy, which at first glance may not be satisfying;
we shall explain it here in a few words.
In this representation, all the meridians make straight
lines and all their degrees are equal: two meridians that are
distant apart by one degree converge in such a manner that
under two elevations from the pole the degrees of longitude
make with the degrees of latitude the same ratio as in reality.
For this, the two elevations of the pole that we choose are
those that are at the same distance from the extremities of
the region that we wish to represent, than from its middle.
In this manner, it happens that under these elevations the
ratio between the degrees of longitude and latitude happens
to be accurate, and that at the other locations it is almost
correct. And thus, the whole representation makes the posi-
tions as much precise as possible. In the map of the Russian
Empire, and in the present one which represents the regions
MATHEMATICS AND MAP DRAWING IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 15

Figure 6. Map of Palestine, from Euler’s Atlas Geograph-

icus (Berlin, 1753)

situated between Asia and North America, we have chosen

the elevations of 60 and 45 degrees from the Pole, which
were the best suited for that purpose. In reality, all the me-
ridians merge at a point, but this point is not the Pole; it
is 7 degrees farther than the pole, and from this point as
center all the parallel circles are described with equal dis-
tance among themselves. Now if in a similar frame we mark
all the regions contained between the elevations of 45 to 68
degrees from the pole, their positions will differ by such a
small amount from the true ones that we can hardly see the
error. But if we wanted to place in this frame regions that
are closer to the Pole or to the Equator, the error would be
enormous. Hence, we see that we must completely exclude
the representation of these regions, as Mr. Delisle did in the
Map.
One should not regard as a shortage of this map the fact
that the center in which all the meridians intersect is so far
from the Pole, since according to this method it cannot be
marked. Also, we should not be surprised if on this map
the parallels, which form semi-circles, do not occupy 180o
16 ATHANASE PAPADOPOULOS

Figure 7. Map of the Northern Pacific, with the Eastern

part of Asia and the Northern part of America, from Euler’s
Atlas Geographicus (Berlin, 1753)

in longitude, but much more, sometimes even up to 250o .

From this we see that this map does not suffer from the fact
that it has a too large amount of longitude defect.

Another commentary on Delisle’s method, and in particular on the fact

that the meridians do not meet at point which corresponds to the North or
South pole, is given by Euler in a memoir we shall review now.
In the year 1766, Euler, who was 69 years old and in his highest produc-
tion period, presented to the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences three
memoirs on geography (the memoirs were published a couple of years later,
[21, 22, 23]). We review here one of them, which concerns Delisle’s method
of projection. The memoir is titled De proiectione geographica Deslisliana in
mappa generali imperii russici usitata (On Delisle’s geographical projection
used in the general map of the Russian empire) [21]. We shall talk about
the two others in the next section.
 MATHEMATICS AND MAP DRAWING IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 17

Euler starts his memoir by stating the inconveniences of a stereographic

projection that was used by Hasius,5 also known as the “stereographic ho-
rizontal projection”, or the “Haas stereographic projection”. This is a pro-
jection whose center is a point on the sphere, onto a plane which intersects
the sphere along a small circle. The point diametrically opposite to the
center of the projection is called the “location”, and the projection plane
intersects the sphere in a circle called the “rational horizon” of the location.
The meridian passing through the location is called the “central meridian”.
In §2 and 3 of the memoir, Euler mentions two inconveniences of this map:
the excessive unevenness of the scale on the image of the central meridian,
and the fact that the images of the meridians are not evenly curved on the
map. He then writes (§3) that a certain property of a geographical map is
desirable, namely, that one should be able to extract any part of it in such a
way that this part is a reasonable map of the subregion represented, and can
be used without change. He then says that this implies that the difference
in curvature of the meridians should not be noticeable. The stereographic
projection, in which all meridians are represented by straight lines that in-
tersect at the pole, does not have the latter inconvenience, but it has the
shortage that the scale is very uneven along these meridians.
In §5, Euler states four properties that are ideally required from a geo-
graphical map:
(1) The images of the meridians are straight lines;
(2) the degrees of latitudes do not change along meridians;
(3) the images of the parallels meet the images of the meridians at right
angles;
(4) at each point of the map, the ratio of the degree on the parallel to
the degree on the meridian is the same as on the sphere.
He then declares that since this cannot be achieved simultaneously, one
may request, instead of the last condition, that the deviation of the degree
of latitude to the degree of longitude at each point from the true ratio be as
small as possible (ideally, this error should be unnoticeable).
After this, Euler recalls that Delisle was in charge of constructing such
maps, and that in doing this he started by requiring that the ratio between
latitude and longitude be exact at two noteworthy parallels. He writes that
Delisle was of the opinion that the deviation will be small everywhere if
these two parallels are equidistant from the middle parallel of the map and
from its outermost edges. He then says that the question becomes that
of choosing these two circles of parallels in such a way that the maximum
deviation over the entire map is minimized.
Starting from §7, Euler explains, based on mathematical considerations,
how to construct a family of straight lines representing meridians which
5Johann Matthias Hasius (or Haas) (1684-1742) was a professor of mathematics
in Wittenberg. He drew several maps and published a treatise on cartography,
Sciagraphia integri tractatus de constructione mapparum omnis generis (Müller,
Leipzig, 1717). We mention his map “Imperii Russici et Tatariae universae tam
majoris et asiaticae quam minoris et europaeae tabula” (Geographical map of the
Russian Empire and of Tataria, both large and small, in Europe and Asia), pub-
lished in Nuremberg in 1739, which is related to our topic here.
18 ATHANASE PAPADOPOULOS

are one degree distant from each other. The construction starts with the
choice of a meridian passing through the Russian Empire, considered as the
principal meridian. He then gives a method for drawing the other meridians,
which become straight lines that all intersect at a point which is not the
North Pole of the Earth. This implies that near the North Pole, the picture
is wrong, but Euler notes that for the drawing of maps of the Russian
Empire, there is no need to represent regions beyond 70o of latitude. He
computes the error in scale at this degree of latitude and he shows that it
can be neglected.
Once the intersection point of the meridians is found, the parallels are
drawn as circles centered at this point. The construction allows the con-
struction of circles such that for the region comprised between the two lat-
itudes we started with, the ratio of the degree of latitude to the degree of
longitude is faithfully represented.
In §10–16, Euler gives the mathematical details showing how far this
representation differs from reality at the extreme points he started with,
and in §17–23, he makes the actual computations in the special case where
the map is that of the Russian Empire.
In §24 and 25, he studies images of great circles on the sphere by the geo-
graphical map. He shows that these images are not noticeably different from
Euclidean circular arcs and he computes the radius of such an arc, which he
finds very large. Since a Euclidean circle of large radius is approximately a
Euclidean line, he concludes that the shortest lines on the map do not differ
sensibly from straight lines.

5. Euler as a geographer
Among Euler’s early works on geography, we mention his memoir Metho-
dus viri celeberrimi Leonhardi Euleri determinandi gradus meridiani pariter
ac paralleli telluris, secundum mensuram a celeb. de Maupertuis cum so-
ciis institutam (Method of the celebrated Leonhard Euler for determining
a degree of the meridian, as well as of a parallel of the Earth, based on
the measurement undertaken by the celebrated de Maupertuis and his col-
leagues) [18], presented to the Academy of Sciences of Saint-Petersburg in
1741 and published in 1750.
From a more theoretical point of view, Euler published in 1777 three
memoirs on mappings from the sphere onto the Euclidean plane, motivated
by the problems of cartography:
(1) De proiectione geographica Deslisliana in mappa generali imperii
russici usitata (On Delisle’s geographic projection used in the gen-
eral map of the Russian empire) [21];
(2) De repraesentatione superficiei sphaericae super plano (On the rep-
resentation of spherical surfaces on a plane) [22];
(3) De proiectione geographica superficiei sphaericae (On the geograph-
ical projections of spherical surfaces) [23];
We have analyzed the first memoir in the preceding section.
In the second memoir [22], questions on geographical maps are included
in the setting of differential calculus and the calculus of variations. Let us
recall in this connection that the problem of finding the shortest lines on a
 MATHEMATICS AND MAP DRAWING IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 19

surface, which is typically a problem of calculus of variations, was considered

by Euler in his early youth, see [14]. In many ways, this problem is related
to questions posed by geographical maps.
In the introduction of his memoir [22], Euler declares that he shall not
consider only maps obtained by central projection of the sphere onto the
plane, which he calls “optical projections”, but mappings “in the widest
sense of the word.” He writes (§1 of [22]): “I take the word ‘mapping’ in the
widest possible sense; any point of the spherical surface is represented on
the plane by any desired rule, so that every point of the sphere corresponds
to a specified point in the plane, and conversely.”
In §9, Euler proves that there is no “perfect” or “exact” mapping from
the sphere onto a plane. The meaning of the word “perfect” was the cause of
some confusion among the authors who quoted this memoir by Euler (it was
interpreted as the fact that the map cannot preserve distances up to a scale,
a fact that was well-known long before Euler), see the report in the paper
[45]. A precise statement of Euler’s theorem is given in the paper [6]. In
this context, a map is said to be perfect if, locally, distances are preserved
infinitesimally along the meridians and the parallels, and if, furthermore,
the angles between meridians and parallels are preserved. Thus, we see
once again the importance of these two systems of lines. Euler proves this
result through the study of certain partial differential equations. A detailed
and modern proof based on Euler’s ideas is given in [6]. We stress on the
fact that, although meridians are geodesics, parallels are not, therefore one
cannot immediately conclude that the map considered by Euler is a local
isometry.
With this result established, Euler searches for maps which best approx-
imate the desired properties. He examines several particular projections of
the sphere, looking systematically for the partial differential equations that
they satisfy. He considers in particular the following three kinds of maps:
(1) maps in which the images of all the meridians are perpendicular to
a given axis (the “horizontal” axis in the plane), while all parallels
are parallel to it;
(2) conformal maps;
(3) maps where surface area is preserved (up to scale).
He then gives examples of various maps satisfying each of the above three
properties: projections of the sphere onto a tangent plane, onto a cylinder
tangent to the equator, etc. and he studies distance and angle distortion
under them. At the end of his memoir (§60), he notes that his work is rather
theoretical, and has no immediate practical use.
In contrast, in the memoir [23], Euler studies projections that are used in
practical geography, that is, in the actual construction of maps (he emphas-
izes this in §20). Unlike the memoir [22] which is based on the techniques
of differential calculus, the present one makes heavy use of spherical trigo-
nometry. Euler gives formulae for the images of the equator, parallels and
meridians under stereographic projection onto a plane that is tangent to the
sphere at an arbitrary point.
Euler’s duties as a geographer also involved the examination of thousands
of maps that were printed by the Academy. He was displeased with this task
20 ATHANASE PAPADOPOULOS

and he pretended that it was responsible for the deterioration of his vision.
In a letter to Christian Goldbach, dated August 21st (September 1st, new
Style), 1740, he writes (cf. [25] p. 163, English translation p. 672):
Geography is fatal to me. As you know, Sir, I have lost an
eye working on it; and just now I nearly risked the same
thing again. This morning I was sent a lot of maps to exam-
ine, and at once I felt the repeated attacks. For as this work
constrains one to survey a large area at the same time, it
affects the eyesight much more violently than simple reading
or writing. I therefore most humbly request you, Sir, to be
so good as to persuade the President by a forceful interven-
tion that I should be graciously exempted from this chore,
which not only keeps me from my ordinary tasks, but also
may easily disable me once and for all.
In the next section, we shall talk about the work of Lagrange on geo-
graphy.

6. Lagrange
Joseph-Louis Lagrange was 19 years younger than Euler and he was prob-
ably, among the large number of mathematicians with whom the latter cor-
responded, the only one capable of understanding all his works. The two
men, in their long mathematical correspondence, discussed a great variety
of topics, including number theory, analysis, geometry, physics, etc. In al-
most every field, they obtained complementary results, and geography was
no exception.
Two years after the three memoirs of Euler that we mentioned appeared
in print, Lagrange published two memoirs on geography, [33], both carrying
the title Sur la construction des cartes géographiques (On the construction
of geographical maps). In these memoirs, Lagrange declares that he extends
works of several mathematicians, and he mentions in particular Euler and
Lambert.6
6Johann-Heinrich Lambert (1728-1777) was a Swiss-born mathematician for
whom Euler had a great consideration. He was completely self-taught and he be-
came a remarkable mathematician, astronomer, physicist and philosopher. He was
hired at the Berlin Academy of Sciences at Euler’s recommendation, and he spent
there the last ten years of his life. Lambert is sometimes considered as the founder
of modern cartography. His work Anmerkungen und Zusätze zur Entwerfung der
Land- und Himmelscharten (Remarks and complements for the design of terrestrial
and celestial maps, 1772) [35] contains seven new types of geographical maps, each
one having important features. His name is associated with the so-called Lambert
conformal conic projection, the transverse Mercator, the Lambert azimuthal equal
area projection, and the Lambert cylindrical equal-area projection. In the same
memoir, Lambert obtained a mathematical characterization of an arbitrary angle-
preserving map from the sphere onto the plane. His projections are still mentioned
in the modern textbooks of cartography, and some of them were still in use in the
twentieth century, for military and other purposes, until the appearance of satellite
maps. Lambert, in his work, took into account the fact that the Earth is spher-
oidal and not spherical. His memoir [35] is part of his larger treatise Beiträge zum
 MATHEMATICS AND MAP DRAWING IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 21

Besides extending the works of his predecessors in geography, Lagrange

brought several new ideas of his own. In particular, he introduced a no-
tion of distortion that had an important impact on the works of several
mathematicians, in particular on Pafnouti Chebyshev, who worked in Saint
Petersburg a few decades after Euler. We shall mention Chebyshev’s con-
tribution to geography in the concluding section of this paper. Let us now
review some works of Lagrange related to our topic.
In the introduction to his first memoir [33, p. 637], Lagrange starts by
declaring that a geographical map is nothing but a plane figure which rep-
resents the surface of the Earth, or some part of it. He recalls that since
the Earth is spherical—or rather spheroidal, as he says—, it is not possible
to represent on a Euclidean plane an arbitrary part of it without altering
the positions and distances of various places. One can look then for best
possible maps; and the less the alteration of the distances is, the better
the geographical map is. He then surveys several projections of the Earth
(and of the Celestial sphere) that were used before him, among which we
have the central projection, whose center of projection is at the center of the
globe. This projection sends the great circles (therefore, the meridians) to
straight lines, whereas the small circles (such as the parallels) are sent either
to circles or to ellipses, according to whether their plane is parallel or not to
the projection plane. A major advantage of the central projection is that the
shortest way between two locations is the straight line on the map, since the
great circles of the sphere are sent to straight lines. Lagrange recalls that
this projection is usually applied in such a way that the projection plane is
parallel to the equator, and in this case parallels are sent to circles. This
projection, he says, is mostly used for maps of the Celestial sphere.
Lagrange then mentions the stereographic projection from a point on the
sphere onto a plane, and he recalls two of its main properties: it sends circles
to circles, and it is conformal (that is, it preserves angles). He attributes this
projection to Ptolemy [33, p. 639].7 He declares that the latter was aware
of the first of these properties, which he describes in his treatise Sphaerae
a planetis projectio in planum,8 but that the angle-preserving property may
not have been noticed by the Greek astronomer.
After introducing mappings from the sphere onto a plane that are projec-
tions from some center (allowing also the center to be at infinity, in which
case he calls the projection orthographic), Lagrange mentions other con-
formal projections that are not stereographic. He notes that there are infin-
itely many such projections, and he also considers much more general maps.

Gebrauche der Mathematik und deren Anwendung durch (Contributions to the use
of mathematics and its applications) [34].
7According to Delambre [12], Vol. 1, p. 184ff., d’Avezac [2], p. 465 and Neuge-
bauer [40, 39], p. 246., the stereographic projection from the sphere onto a plane
where the center is taken to be a point on the sphere (say the North pole) and
where the plane passes through the center and is perpendicular to the radius passing
through the center of projection, which was probably the most popular projection
of the sphere among mathematicians, was already used by Hipparchus back in the
second century BCE.
8This is the work known as the Planisphaerum which we mentioned in §2.
22 ATHANASE PAPADOPOULOS

He declares, like Euler did before him (cf. the introduction of his memoir
[22]), that geographical maps may be arbitrary maps from (some part of)
the sphere onto a plane. This leads him to the following question:

What is a general mapping between two surfaces?

We mention incidentally that this important question is a two-dimensional

analogue of the question of what is a general function defined on the real
line (or an interval) and which, at that time, was the subject of a fierce
debate among mathematicians; see the account in [43].
Returning to maps from the sphere onto the Euclidean plane, Lagrange
writes [33, p. 640] that the only thing we require for drawing a map is to
specify the images of meridians and parallels according to a certain rule.
Then, we may plot the various places relatively to these lines, in the same
way this is done on the surface of the Earth with respect to the circles of
longitude and latitude. Now, the images of the meridians and parallels are
no more restricted to be circles or lines. They can be, using Lagrange’s
terms, “mechanical lines,” that is, lines drawn by any mechanical device.
In the classical terminology used by the Greeks for curves, this means that
they can be arbitrary lines. He then discusses the reduced marine maps in
which the images of the meridians and of the parallels are parallel straight
lines, and where the ratios of the degrees of latitude and longitude on these
images are the same as on the sphere.
Lagrange then makes a short historical overview of the question of how
general can be a mapping from the sphere onto the plane that may be used
in map drawing. He refers to the work of Lambert, who was the first to
talk about arbitrary angle-preserving maps from the sphere to the plane
in relation with geography. He recalls that the latter expressed the idea
of the determination of the images of the meridians and the parallels by
the sole condition that the map is angle-preserving. In fact, in his memoir
[34], Lambert solved the problem of characterizing least-distortion maps
among those which are angle-preserving. Lagrange also recalls that Euler,
like Lambert did before him, gave a solution of the problem of finding maps
with least distortion among arbitrary angle-preserving maps. Lagrange then
develops his own solution, by a method which is different from those of
Lambert and Euler. He asserts that none of his predecessors has considered
yet the general problem of determining all the conformal maps by which
the images of the meridians and the parallels are circles and he considers
this problem in some detail. As a matter of fact, Lagrange, in his paper,
solves the problem of finding all the orthonormal projections of a surface of
revolution which send meridians and parallels to straight lines or circles. He
introduces an explicit formula for the local distortion factor of a conformal
map, as the ratio of the infinitesimal length element at the image by the
infinitesimal length element at the source. This formula played a central
role in the work of Chebyshev, as we shall recall in the next section.
 MATHEMATICS AND MAP DRAWING IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 23

7. A glimpse of later developments

In the preceding sections, we saw that in the eighteenth century, carto-
graphy underwent substantial developments, thanks to the efforts of prom-
inent mathematicians like Euler, Lambert and Lagrange. The subject con-
tinued to grow in the nineteenth century. In this concluding section, I would
like to say a few words about these developments.
We start with the work of Gauss.
Gauss considered himself as a physicist rather than a mathematician. We
recall in this respect that the terminology “isothermal coordinates” which
he introduced in the study of the differential geometry of surfaces and which
is still used today, for a locally conformal map between a subdomain of the
plane and a subdomain of the surface, clearly indicates the fact that while
working on this subject, he was thinking about heat diffusion. Gauss was
also in charge of surveying geodetically the German kingdom of Hannover.
In 1825, he published a paper, in the Astronomische Abhandlungen (Mem-
oirs on astronomy), titled Allgemeine Lösung der Aufgabe, die Teile einer
gegebenen Fläche auf eine ander gegebene Fläche so abzubilden dass die Ab-
bildung dem Abgebildeten in den kleinisten Teilen ähnlich wird. (General
solution of the problem: to represent the parts of a given surface on another
so that the smallest parts of the representation shall be similar to the cor-
responding parts of the surface represented) [27]. The title indicates enough
explicitly the relation with geography. As we saw, this is the kind of prob-
lem that was considered by Euler, Lagrange and other mathematicians, in
their work on this field. In this paper, Gauss showed that every sufficiently
small neighborhood of a point in an arbitrary real-analytic surface can be
mapped conformally onto a subset of the plane, however, without solving the
problem of mapping conformally an arbitrary finite portion of the surface;
this was one of the questions considered by Riemann, after Gauss. In the
preface, Gauss wrote that his aim was only to construct geographical maps
and to study the general principles of geodesy for the task of land surveying.
Surveying the kingdom of Hannover took nearly two decades to be com-
pleted, and it led Gauss gradually to the investigation of triangulations, to
the use of the method of least squares in geodesy, and then to his famous
memoir Disquisitiones generales circa superficies curvas [29], in which we
can find coordinates that he computed of several cities in Germany (§27; p.
43 of the English translation [29]).
Let us mention two other papers by Gauss related to geodesy: Bestim-
mung des Breitenunterschiedes zwischen den Sternwarten von Göttingen und
Altona durch Beobachtungen am Ramsdenschen Zenithsector (Determina-
tion of the latitudinal difference between the observatories in Göttingen and
Altona by observations with a Ramsden zenith sector) [30] (1928) and Un-
tersuchungen über Gegenstände der höhern Geodäsie (Research on objects of
higher geodesy) [31] (1843 and 1847). In the latter, Gauss uses the method
of least squares.
Another major representative of the 19th-century differential-geometric
work on geography is Eugenio Beltrami, who worked on this subject in the
tradition of Gauss. His 1865 paper Risoluzione del problema: Riportare
i punti di una superficie sopra un piano in modo che le linee geodetiche
24 ATHANASE PAPADOPOULOS

vengano rappresentate da linee rette (Solution of the problem: to send the

points of a surface onto a plane in such a way that the geodesic lines are
represented by straight lines) [3] contains his well-known result saying that
a Riemannian metric on a surface that can be locally mapped onto the plane
in such a way that the geodesics are sent to Euclidean lines has necessarily
constant curvature. Beltrami declares that a certain amount of the research
done before him on this kind of problem was directed towards questions of
conservation of angles or of area, and that even though these two properties
are considered to be the simplest and most important ones for geograph-
ical maps, there are other properties that one might want to preserve. He
mentions that the central projection of the sphere is the only map that trans-
forms the geodesics of the sphere into Euclidean straight lines, but that one
needs other maps, in which the images of great circles are not very far from
being straight lines. He writes that beyond its applications to geographical
maps, this kind of problem will lead to “a new method of geodesic calculus,
in which the questions concerning geodesic triangles on surfaces can all be
reduced to simple questions of plane trigonometry.”
We now say a few words on the work of Chebyshev, one of those prominent
19th century mathematicians who worked in Saint Petersburg and who is
considered as the founder of the Russian school there, which in some sense
replaced the school founded by Euler.
Chebyshev was interested in applications of mathematics, and geography
was among them. In 1856, he wrote two papers on geography [7, 8] carrying
the same title as the two papers that Lagrange published 77 years before [33],
Sur la construction des cartes géographiques. In these papers, Chebyshev,
addressed the problem of finding geographical maps whose distortion is min-
imal. He made a relation between this problem and Laplace’s equation, thus
reducing the problem of finding the best geographical map to a problem in
potential theory. At the beginning of the second paper, Chebyshev declares:
“Today, [Mathematical sciences] produce a greater interest because of their
influence on art and industry. Not only practice makes profit of these rela-
tions: conversely, science itself grows under the influence of practice.” Then,
Chebyshev elaborates on the importance in this context of the problem of
constructing geographical maps, establishing relations with the problem of
heat distribution and with other problems and including them in the same
setting of infinitesimal calculus.
In his papers on geography, Chebyshev, starting with formulae that Lag-
range gave on the distortion of maps from the sphere to the plane, announced
several important results, including the existence of a map with least distor-
sion from an arbitrary simply connected open subset of the sphere bounded
by a twice differentiable curve, onto to the Euclidean plane. This map has
the property that the parallels and the meridians are represented by curves
that do not differ significantly from circles or straight lines. Chebyshev also
proved that such a map is unique up to a similarity of the Euclidean plane.
Furthermore, he showed that the magnification ratio of this map is constant
on the boundary curve of the domain and he obtained precise estimates on
the distorsion in the case where the boundary curve is close to an ellipse.
Chebyshev did not publish the proofs of his results.
 MATHEMATICS AND MAP DRAWING IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 25

Darboux in a paper published in 1911 [11] and which carries the same title
as Chebyshev’s, Sur la construction des cartes géographiques, gave complete
proofs of Chebyshev’s main result. The same result was also reviewed in a
paper [37] by Milnor, where Chebyshev’s work, together with that of Lag-
range on geography, are put in modern perspective. We refer the interested
reader to Chebyshev’s papers [7, 8] and the reviews of these papers in [42]
and [44].
Talking about the 19th century, let us also mention the second doctoral
thesis of the French mathematician Ossian Bonnet, titled Sur la théorie
mathématique des cartes géographiques (On on the mathematical theory of
geographical maps) [4]. In this work, Bonnet starts by recalling that the
first geographical maps were projections that are subject to the laws of
perspective, and he then declares that “some astronomers” abandoned this
perspective way of drawing maps, and considered arbitrary ways of drawing
the lines corresponding to the meridians and parallels, depending on the
usage of the map. He attributes to Lambert the formulation of the problem
of finding, for a given region of the sphere, the images of the meridians and
the parallels by a map which is conformal and such that at the infinitesimal
level distances are preserved on these lines. Bonnet declares that Lambert
did not completely solve the problem, that Euler and Lagrange considered
it again (we talked about a similar problem considered by Euler in the
paper [22]), and that Gauss, in his Mémoire Couronné [28], solved it in
full generality, without making any hypothesis on the form of the Earth.
The main part of Bonnet’s thesis contains an exposition of the work of
Lambert on cartography, together with a simplification of the solutions of
the questions he asked that were given by Lagrange, Euler and Gauss.
Bonnet’s thesis was published in the Journal de mathématiques pures et
appliquées, edited by Liouville. In a note at the end of the paper, the latter
writes that he addressed these questions on geography in a series of lectures
he gave at the Collège de France, in the academic year 1850-1851, and
that he wishes to publish them. He also notes that he presented his ideas
on the subject in the Notes of his edition of Monge’s book, Applications de
l’analyse à la géométrie, [38]. In fact, in Note V and VI, Liouville formulates
a problem he calls the “three-dimensional geographical drawing problem”.
The title of Note V is Du tracé géographique des surfaces les unes sur les
autres (On the geographical drawing of surfaces one onto the other). In
this note, Liouville formulates the problem as the one of finding a mapping
between two surfaces which is a similarity at the infinitesimal level. He
declares that this is equivalent to requiring that the infinitesimal triangles
on the first surface are sent by the map to similar infinitesimal triangles
on the second one. He then formulates the same problem using ratios of
infinitesimal line elements at a point on one surface and the one at its image:
the ratio at any point should not depend on the chosen direction. He notes
that this condition (which, in fact, is conformality) was adopted by Lambert,
Lagrange and Gauss as a general principle in their theory of geographical
maps. In Notes V and VI, Liouville gives his solution to the problem he
formulates.
26 ATHANASE PAPADOPOULOS

As a conclusion, we quote Darboux, from his his talk at the 1908 ICM held
in Rome, titled Les origines, les méthodes et les problèmes de la géométrie
infinitésimale (The origins, methods and problems of infinitesimal geometry)
[10]:
Like many other branches of human knowledge, infinites-
imal geometry was born in the study of practical problems.
The Ancients were already busy in obtaining plane repres-
entations of the various parts of the Earth, and they had
adopted the idea, which was so natural, of projecting onto a
plane the surface of our globe. During a very long period of
time, people were exclusively attached to these methods of
projection, restricting simply to the study of the best ways
to choose, in each case, the point of view and the plane of
the projection. It was one of the most penetrating geomet-
ers, Lambert, the very estimated colleague of Lagrange at
the Berlin Academy, who, pointing out for the first time a
property which is common to the Mercator maps, also called
reduced maps, and to those which are provided by the ste-
reographic projection, was the first to conceive the theory
of geographical maps from a really general point of view.
He proposed, with all its scope, the problem of representing
the surface of the Earth on a plane keeping the similarity of
the infinitely small elements. This beautiful question, which
gave rise to the researches of Lambert himself, of Euler, and
to two very important memoirs of Lagrange, was treated for
the first time in all generality by Gauss. [...] Among the
essential notions introduced by Gauss, one has to note the
systematic use of the curvilinear coordinates on a surface,
the idea of considering a surface like a flexible and inextens-
ible fabric, which led the great geometer to his celebrated
theorem on the invariance of total curvature, to the beautiful
properties of geodesic lines and their orthogonal trajector-
ies, to the generalization of the theorem of Albert Girard on
the area of the spherical triangle, to all these concrete and
final truths which, like many other results due to the genius
of the great geometer, were meant to preserve, across the
ages, the name and the memory of the one who was the first
to discover them.
In many ways, this article may be considered as an expansion of this
quote.

Acknowledgements. This paper was written after a talk I gave on the

same subject at the International Conference on History and Recent De-
velopments in Mathematics that took place on December 17–19 at the
Madhuben and Bhanubhai Patel Institute of Technology (New VV Nagar,
Gujarat, India). I would like to thank Darshana Prajapati and S. G. Dani
who organized this event. I would also like to thank the referee of this paper
for his very useful comments.
 MATHEMATICS AND MAP DRAWING IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 27

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Athanase Papadopoulos, Université de Strasbourg and CNRS, 7 rue

René Descartes, 67084 Strasbourg Cedex, France
E-mail address: [email protected]