I love the Marriot Library at the University of Utah. But sometimes you get a little disappointed and pleased at the same time.
I get to write a ten-page math paper (again), this time on Mercator, a man who made maps in the late-ish 16th century. We still use his system today. He created a map that used straight lines but still depicted the latitude and longitude correctly. Blah blah blah. I'll get to the point:
There aren't very many resources on this guy. Most of the books that were applicable to what I needed were in Latin. In fact, the three books I managed to check out in English are all related to each other, one cites the other two, the other two cite each other, etc.
When I was looking him up in the library catalogue, I found that the library had some of his own original works translated into English! I was excited to have such good resources, only to find that the books themselves are so rare, they are enclosed in glass boxes where you can't even thumb the pages for the information you need. Awesome! And dang.
I'll go back to reading his biography, hoping to find the necessary math in there somewhere...
I get to write a ten-page math paper (again), this time on Mercator, a man who made maps in the late-ish 16th century. We still use his system today. He created a map that used straight lines but still depicted the latitude and longitude correctly. Blah blah blah. I'll get to the point:
There aren't very many resources on this guy. Most of the books that were applicable to what I needed were in Latin. In fact, the three books I managed to check out in English are all related to each other, one cites the other two, the other two cite each other, etc.
When I was looking him up in the library catalogue, I found that the library had some of his own original works translated into English! I was excited to have such good resources, only to find that the books themselves are so rare, they are enclosed in glass boxes where you can't even thumb the pages for the information you need. Awesome! And dang.
I'll go back to reading his biography, hoping to find the necessary math in there somewhere...
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