Come facevano a essere così accurate? Un cartografo cerca nella matematica un metodo per spiegarlo. "That first portolan mapmaker also created an enormous
puzzle for historians to come, because he left behind few hints of his
method: no rough drafts, no sketches, no descriptions of his work. “Even
with all the information he had — every sailor’s notebook, every
description in every journal — I wouldn’t know how to make the map he
made,” says John Hessler, a specialist in modern cartography at the
Library of Congress.
But Hessler has approached the question using a tool that
is foreign to most historians: mathematics. By systematically analyzing
the discrepancies between the portolan charts and modern ones, Hessler
has begun to trace the mapmaker’s tracks within the maps themselves". Julie Rehmeyer, discovermagazine.
