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Documents for "Geography: Biographies":
  • Anville, Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d' 1697-1782, French geographer and cartographer. His maps of ancient geography, characterized by careful, accurate work and based largely on original research, are especially valuable. He left...
  • Apianus, Petrus Latinized from Peter Bienewitz or Bennewitz , 1495-1552, German cosmographer and mathematician. He was professor of mathematics at Ingolstadt and was noted for his knowledge of astronomy and his general learning. Best known among his writings...
  • Arrowsmith, Aaron 1750-1823, English cartographer and geographer. He founded the map-making and publishing business carried on by his sons and by his nephew John Arrowsmith, 1790-1873. John Arrowsmith's London Atlas...
  • Artemidorus of Ephesus fl. 103 BC, Greek geographer quoted by Strabo. He wrote 11 books on his Mediterranean travels. Only fragments remain of his work.
  • Büsching, Anton Friedrich 1724-93, German geographer and educator. He was professor of philosophy in Göttingen, was a Protestant minister, and was director of a Gymnasium in Berlin. He advocated the collection of data...
  • Baedeker, Karl 1801-59, German publisher, founder of the Baedeker guidebooks. His printing establishment was at Koblenz, but his son Fritz, who continued the business, moved it to Leipzig. Printed in several...
  • Baker, Oliver Edwin 1883-1949, American economic geographer, grad. Heidelberg College, Tiffin, Ohio. He studied forestry at Yale and agriculture and economics at the Univ. of Wisconsin (Ph.D., 1921). He served...
  • Barrow, Sir John 1764-1848, British geographer, promoter of arctic exploration. His early travels as secretary to Earl Macartney (who was ambassador to China and governor of the Cape of Good Hope colony) were...
  • Behaim, Martin b. 1436? or 1459?, d. 1506?, German traveler and cosmographer. He studied (possibly under Regiomontanus) astronomy, navigation, and mathematics. He went to Portugal as a merchant c.1480, and in...
  • Blanchard, Raoul 1877-1965, French geographer. He wrote a monograph on Flanders (1906) that earned him the chair of geography at the Univ. of Grenoble, a position he held for 50 years. He established the Institute...
  • Blunt, George William 1802-78, American hydrographer; son of Edmund March Blunt, a pioneer publisher of nautical books and charts in Newburyport, Mass. He established (1821) himself in a similar business in New York and...
  • Bowman, Isaiah 1878-1950, American geographer, b. Waterloo, Ont., B.S. Harvard, 1905, Ph.D. Yale, 1909. He taught geography at Yale (1905-15) and was director (1915-35) of the American Geographical Society. He...
  • Bradshaw, George 1801-53, English map engraver and the originator of railway guides. Bradshaw's Railway Time-Tables, first published in 1839, became Bradshaw's Monthly Railway Guide (first issued 1841). He afterward...
  • Brigham, Albert Perry 1855-1932, American geographer, b. Perry, N.Y., grad. Colgate Univ., 1879, M. A. Harvard, 1892. After nine years in the Baptist ministry (1882-91) he became professor of geology at Colgate, where...
  • Brunhes, Jean 1869-1932, French geographer. He was a leading exponent of French systematic, as opposed to regional, geography. He studied human artifacts in the context of environment. He authored many texts,...
  • David, T. W. E. (Sir Tannatt William Edgeworth), 1858-1935, Australian geologist and explorer, b. near Cardiff, Wales. David came to Australia in 1882 as an assistant geological surveyor. In 1891 he was appointed...
  • Davidson, George 1825-1911, American geographer and astronomer, b. England. From 1845 to 1895 he was on the staff of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey. He charted (1850-60) the U.S. Pacific coast for navigation...
  • Davis, William Morris 1850-1934, American geographer, geologist, and teacher, b. Philadelphia; B.S. Harvard, 1869. He founded (1904) the Association of American Geographers and served three terms as its president. He...
  • Delisle, Guillaume 1675-1726, French geographer and cartographer. His most important work is a world map (1700), as accurate as the data available at that time permitted and the first map on which the errors of...
  • Demangeon, Albert 1872-1940, French geographer, specializing in the study of regional and economic geography. His best-known works include Le Déclin de L'Europe (1920), L'Empire britannique (1923), and Les...
  • Des Barres, Joseph Frederick Wallet 1721?-1824, British army officer, surveyor, and artist. He was born of French parents (probably in Switzerland), was educated at Basel and in Great Britain, and became a British citizen. He served...
  • Erskine, Robert 1735-80, geographer and surveyor general to the American Revolutionary army, b. Dunfermline, Scotland. His several hundred detailed maps of the region W of the Hudson River, showing roads,...
  • Evans, Lewis c.1700-1756, colonial surveyor and geographer, b. Wales. Evans carried out several assignments for Benjamin Franklin. His travels and studies of the colonies nearest him bore fruit in two maps, A Map of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and the Three Delaware Counties (1749, rev. ed. 1752) and A General Map of the Middle British Colonies in America published together with an Analysis (1755). The first of these was used by migrating colonists for the excellent detail of the roads. The second was used by General Braddock during the French and Indian War, and was published many...
  • Everest, Sir George 1790-1866, British surveyor, b. Breconshire, Wales. He worked on the trigonometrical survey of India from 1806 to 1843. He became superintendent of the survey in 1823 and surveyor general of India...
  • Fenneman, Nevin M. 1865-1945, American geologist, geographer, and teacher, b. Lima, Ohio; B.A. (1883) Heidelberg College, Ohio; M.A. (1900); Ph.D. (1901) Univ. of Chicago. He founded and was chairman (1907-37) of...
  • Flinders, Matthew 1774-1814, English naval captain and hydrographer, noted for his charting and coast surveys of Australia and Tasmania. From 1795 to 1799 and again from 1801 to 1803 he made valuable maps and charts...
  • Gannett, Henry 1846-1914, American geographer, b. Bath, Maine, grad. Harvard (B.S., 1869; M.E., 1870). His first work as a topographer was on the Hayden Survey. After 1882 he was chief geographer of the U.S...
  • Gautier, Émile Félix 1864-1940, French geographer, an authority on Algiers, the Sahara, and the French African possessions. He explored W Madagascar (1892-94) and traversed the Sahara in various directions. His books...
  • Godwin-Austen, Henry Haversham 1834-1923, English topographer and geologist. An officer in the British army (1851-77), he was assigned to several government surveys in N India, especially in the Himalayas. He explored and...
  • Goode, John Paul 1862-1932, American geographer and cartographer, b. Stewartville, Minn., grad. Univ. of Minnesota, 1889, Ph.D. Univ. of Pennsylvania, 1901. He taught geography at the Univ. of Pennsylvania...
  • Gough, Richard 1735-1809, English antiquary, authority on British topography. His valuable collection of books and manuscripts is in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Chief among his many works are Anecdotes of British...
  • Gray, Robert 1755-1806, American sea captain, discoverer of the Columbia River, b. Tiverton, R.I. He probably served in the Continental navy in the American Revolution. In 1787 he and Capt. John Kendrick were...
  • Greely, Adolphus Washington 1844-1935, American army officer and arctic explorer, b. Newburyport, Mass. Entering the Union army at 17, he emerged a brevet major of volunteers at the end of the Civil War. In 1881, as a...
  • Hakluyt, Richard 1552?-1616, English geographer. He graduated in 1574 from Oxford, where he later lectured on geography. A passionate interest in the history of discovery led him to collect and publish narratives...
  • Hettner, Alfred 1859-1942, German geographer and teacher; a founder of modern German geography. His methodology and his materialistic philosophy, grounded in the work of Immanuel Kant , have had a great influence...
  • Huntington, Ellsworth 1876-1947, American geographer, b. Galesburg, Ill., grad. Beloit College, 1897, M.A. Harvard, 1902, Ph.D. Yale, 1909. He taught at Euphrates College, Turkey (1897-1901); accompanied the Pumpelly...
  • Idrisi or Edrisi , b. 1099?, d. after 1154, Arab geographer, b. Ceuta. He traveled in Europe, Asia Minor, and Mediterranean lands and settled at the court of Roger II of Sicily, for whom he made a silver celestial globe and a map of the earth engraved on a plate of...
  • Johnston, Alexander Keith 1804-71, Scottish cartographer and geographer royal of Scotland. He issued many notable atlases, maps, and gazetteers, including The National Atlas of Historical, Commercial, and Political Geography (1843), The Physical Atlas of Natural Phenomena (1848), The Dictionary of Geography (1850; known as Johnston's Gazetteer ), and The Royal Atlas of Modern Geography (1861). A son, Alexander Keith Johnston, 1844-79, carried on the work of the map-publishing house founded by his father. He assisted (1873-75) in a survey of Paraguay and died in Africa while leading an expedition of the Royal...
  • Kennan, George 1845-1924, American authority on Siberia, b. Norwalk, Ohio. In 1864 he made the first of his journeys to East Asia as an engineer. His articles on Siberia, for many years almost the sole...
  • Koch, Lauge 1892-1964, Danish geologist and explorer, noted for his scientific work in Greenland. He accompanied Knud Rasmussen's second Thule expedition (1916-18) as geologist and cartographer and was chief...
  • Krusenstern, Adam Johann von 1770-1846, Russian navigator. From 1803 to 1806 he circumnavigated the globe. Although the voyage was undertaken to stimulate the fur trade of the Pacific coast and to revive trade with China and...
  • La Condamine, Charles Marie de 1701-74, French traveler and mathematical geographer. He was one of a group sent to Peru in 1735 to measure the length of an arc of one degree of the meridian at the equator. While in South...
  • Münster, Sebastian 1489-1552, German scholar and geographer. He was a Franciscan monk but after the Reformation became a Protestant and taught at Heidelberg and at Basel, where he lived after 1536. A noted...
  • Malte-Brun, Conrad 1775-1826, Danish geographer, b. Jutland but later settled in Paris; originally named Malthe Konrad Bruun. He is responsible for the descriptive, readable style that became characteristic of the...
  • Markham, Sir Clements Robert 1830-1916, English geographer and writer. While in the navy he served on a British expedition (1850-51) to the Arctic to search for the explorer Sir John Franklin. From 1867 to 1877 he supervised...
  • Mawson, Sir Douglas 1882-1958, Australian antarctic explorer and geologist, b. England. His first geographical expedition was to the New Hebrides Islands as a geologist in 1903. As a member of the scientific staff of...
  • Mercator, Gerardus Latin form of Gerhard Kremer , 1512-94, Flemish geographer, mathematician, and cartographer. He studied in Louvain , where he had a geographical establishment (1534). From 1537 to 1540 he surveyed and mapped Flanders. In 1538 he produced his first map of the world (based on Ptolemy's map); in 1541 he made a terrestrial, and in 1551 a celestial, globe. He was appointed (1552) to the chair of cosmography in...
  • Nordenskjöld, Nils Otto Gustaf 1869-1928, Swedish geographer and explorer, nephew of Nils Adolf Erik Nordenskjöld. He headed an expedition to Patagonia (1895-97) and later explored the Klondike and Alaska (1898) and Greenland...
  • Olney, Jesse 1798-1872, American geographer and teacher. His Practical System of Modern Geography (1828), a standard work for decades, revolutionized the teaching of geography. Olney's method was to familiarize students with their own environment in order to progress to the study of more...
  • Ortelius, Abraham 1527-98, Flemish geographer, of German origin. Next to his contemporary Mercator, he is the most renowned of the 16th-century Flemish school of geography. He traveled with Mercator in 1560 and was...
  • Pausanias fl. AD 150, traveler and geographer, probably b. Lydia. His Description of Greece is an invaluable source for the topography, monuments, and legends of ancient Greece. There are translations by J....
  • Payer, Julius von 1842-1915, Austrian explorer and painter. While on an expedition (1872-74) to navigate the Northeast Passage with Karl Weyprecht, Payer accidentally found Franz Josef Land. Payer's expeditions became...
  • Penck, Albrecht 1858-1945, German geographer and geologist. He was professor at the Univ. of Vienna (1885-1906) and at the Univ. of Berlin (1906-26) and was director (1906-22) of the institutes of oceanography...
  • Petermann, August Heinrich 1822-78, German geographer, an authority on the geography of Africa and the Arctic. He had (1847-54) a cartographical establishment in London and in 1854 became director of the Perthes...
  • Pomponius Mela fl. c.AD 50, Roman geographer, b. Spain. His De situ orbis, a description of the then known world, was published in Latin in 1471 and translated into English by Arthur Golding as The Cosmographer...
  • Przhevalsky, Nikolai Mikhailovich 1839-88, Russian geographer and explorer in central and E Asia. He made five major expeditions—one to the Ussuri area in the Russian Far East (1867-68) and four to Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet...
  • Rae, John 1813-93, Scottish arctic explorer, b. Orkney Islands. A physician in the employ of the Hudson's Bay Company in N Canada, Rae made (1846-47) a journey of exploration from Fort Churchill to the Gulf of Boothia, which he described in his Narrative of an Expedition to the Shores of the Arctic Sea (1850). In 1847 he joined Sir John Richardson's expedition in search of the lost party of Sir John Franklin, the British explorer; later (1851) he commanded a search party that crossed the tundra and explored part of Victoria Island. It was not until his expedition of 1853-54, however, that he found...
  • Ratzel, Friedrich 1844-1904, German geographer. He traveled as a journalist in Europe (1869) and in Cuba, Mexico, and the United States (1872-75). Thereafter he devoted himself to geographical studies and taught...
  • Reclus, Jean Jacques Élisée 1830-1905, French geographer, b. Gironde, educated mainly in Germany, where he studied under Karl Ritter. Several times he was forced to leave France because of his political views; he traveled in...
  • Rennell, James 1742-1830, English cartographer, geographer, and oceanographer. He was surveyor general (1764-77) of Bengal and published A Bengal Atlas (1779). He constructed the first approximately correct map of India (1783). A specialist on the geography of W Asia and of North Africa, he wrote on the geographical knowledge of Herodotus (1800),...
  • Richthofen, Ferdinand, Baron von 1833-1905, German geographer, geologist, and traveler. He took part in a Prussian expedition in E Asia (1860-62), worked as a geologist in W United States (1862-68), then made several exploring...
  • Ritter, Karl 1779-1859, German geographer, a founder of modern human geography. He was a professor of geography at the Univ. of Berlin from 1820. He helped define the scope of geography and its relationship to...
  • Ronne, Finn 1899-1980, Norwegian-American Antarctic explorer. Ronne graduated from college in Norway in 1922 and immigrated to the United States. His first of nine Antarctic expeditions was with Admiral Richard...
  • Ross, Sir James Clark 1800-1862, British polar explorer and rear admiral. In 1818 he accompanied his uncle, Sir John Ross, in search of the Northwest Passage and commanded the Erebus. He later studied Eskimo life while on several arctic voyages (1819-27) with W. E. Parry. In another expedition (1829-33) with his uncle, he located (1831) in Boothia Peninsula the north magnetic...
  • Ross, Sir John 1777-1856, British arctic explorer and rear admiral. In 1818 he went in search of the Northwest Passage but turned back after exploring Baffin Bay. Financed by Sir Felix Booth, he commanded a...
  • Sauer, Carl Ortwin 1889-1975, American geographer, b. Warrenton, Mo., grad. Univ. of Chicago (Ph.D., 1915). Sauer was a professor for over 50 years at the Univ. of California at Berkeley, where he built a...
  • Scoresby, William 1789-1857, English arctic explorer and scientist. He made yearly voyages (1803-22) to Greenland, at first on his father's whaler, later as captain on other ships. Preparing himself by study...
  • Scott, Robert Falcon 1868-1912, British naval officer and antarctic explorer. He commanded two noted expeditions to Antarctica. The first expedition (1901-4), in the Discovery, organized jointly by the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Society and well equipped for scientific research, was concerned with exploration of the region around the Ross Sea. Scott's...
  • Semple, Ellen Churchill 1863-1932, American geographer, b. Louisville, Ky., grad. Vassar, 1882, and studied at the Univ. of Leipzig. A follower of the German geographer Ratzel, she helped develop the study of...
  • Shackleton, Sir Ernest Henry 1874-1922, British antarctic explorer, b. Ireland. The first of his voyages to Antarctica was made as a member of the expedition (1901-4) of Robert F. Scott. Shackleton was invalided home in 1903, but the experience gained on the Scott expedition aided him greatly as commander of a south polar expedition (1907-9). In the course of this expedition Mt. Erebus was ascended, the south magnetic pole was located, and the polar plateau was crossed to a point less than 100 mi (160 km) from the South Pole. The scientific results of the expedition were of vast...
  • Smith, Jedediah Strong 1799-1831, American explorer, one of the greatest of the mountain men , b. near Binghamton, N.Y. Early in 1824, Smith took a party through South Pass , beginning the regular use of that route. He and a few men headed north and into present-day Montana and as far north as the Canadian boundary before going back to Great Salt Lake. In 1825 he set...
  • Stefansson, Vilhjalmur 1879-1962, Arctic explorer, b. Canada, of Icelandic parents, educated at the Univ. of North Dakota, the State Univ. of Iowa, and Harvard. He led several expeditions of exploration and of...
  • Stieler, Adolf 1775-1836, German cartographer. He worked most of his life in the Justus Perthes Geographical Institution, Gotha, which published his general atlas (1817-22; 10th ed. tr. 1934-39).
  • Strabo b. c.63 BC, d. after AD 21, Greek geographer, historian, and philosopher, b. Amasya, Pontus. He studied in Asia Minor, Greece, Rome, and Alexandria and traveled in Europe, N Africa, and W Asia...
  • Sverdrup, Otto 1855-1930, Norwegian arctic explorer. A companion of Fridtjof Nansen on the voyage across Greenland in 1888 and on Nansen's later (1893-96) polar expedition, Sverdrup was leader of an arctic...
  • Thompson, David 1770-1857, Canadian geographer, fur trader, and explorer, b. London, England. In 1784 he came to Fort Churchill, Canada, as an apprentice of the Hudson's Bay Company, and until 1797 he was a fur...
  • Toscanelli, Paolo dal Pozzo 1397-1482, Italian cosmographer and mathematician. A physician by training, he was also known as Paul the Physician. He was for a time librarian at Florence. It is said that his map of the world...
  • Varenius, Bernhardus or Bernhard Varen , 1622-50, Dutch geographer. He studied to be a physician, but instead focused on geography. His first work was a geography and history of Japan, Descriptio regni Iaponiae (1649). He is best known for his Geographia generalis (1650), standard for a century and translated into many languages. Newton used part of it in the production of the English Cambridge edition (1682) and incorporated the work into his teaching...
  • Vidal de la Blache, Paul French geographer, 1845-1918, the father of French human geography. He was educated at the École Normale Supérieure, Paris, and had an avid interest in history and geography. He taught geography...
  • Waldseemüller, Martin Gr. Ilacomilus, 1470?-1522?, German cosmographer. One of a group of humanists known as the Gymnasium Vosagense, he lived at Saint-Dié, Lorraine, during the latter part of his life. He was the first cartographer to...
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