Many geographers don’t look at themselves as geographers per se. After all, very few jobs have the title “Geographer”. Geographers are often those behind-the-scene researchers that try to make sense of our world in visual and spatial terms answering basic questions like “Where?” and “Why there?” The best of them have left their mark by helping us to understand and view the world in new and revealing ways.

Timeline of Great Geographers

1. •Pliny the Elder - Roman author and naturalist whose account of the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE gave the name Plinian to the very violent style of volcanic eruption.

   

   
   
2. •Marinus of Tyre was a 1st- to 2nd-century CE Phoenician geographer and cartographer. The founder of mathematical geography, he was the first to assign latitude and longitude to places. As well, he was the first western cartographer to include China on maps.

   

   
   
3. •Ptolemy was a 2nd-century CE Roman citizen of Egypt who compiled all that was known at the time of the world’s geography in his 2-book masterpiece Geographia.

   

   
   
4. •Muhammed al-Idrisi, a 12th-century Muslim geographer living in Sicily, wrote the most complete book of geography for his time, the Tabula Rogeriana of 1154 CE. He also created the most accurate map of the world – a map that would stand for 3 centuries.

   

   
   
5. •Gerardus Mercator - 16th-century Flemish cartographer who devised the Mercator world map projection – so pivotal to world exploration and discovery by sea.

   

   
   
6. •John Snow - Victorian physician and founder of epidemiology, Snow mapped cholera in London in 1854 to help prove the link between illness and drinking water contaminated with sewage.

   

   
   
7. •Arno Peters - Developed the Peters Projection for world maps in the 1974 to help steer us away from the grossly misleading Mercator Projection.

   

   
   

A more complete (ad nauseum) alphabetical list may be found at Wikipedia.