Martin Waldseemüller
German cartographer
- Fame53.7
- Momentum0.0
- Scientists rank#243
Source-basedFalling
- Fame53.7
- Momentum0.0
- Scientists rank#243
- Wikipedia6.7K
Lived 1470–1520, aged 50
ScientistsScientist
Summary
Updated 2026-06-09
He named half the planet. In 1507, German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller put "America" on a map for the first time, crediting Amerigo Vespucci for a continent that hadn't yet registered as separate from Asia.
Biography
About
Born around 1470, Waldseemüller worked as a cartographer and humanist scholar, sometimes going by the Hellenized Hylacomylus. In 1507, he and collaborator Matthias Ringmann produced a world map that did two things no one had done before: it called the New World "America" in honour of Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci, and it showed the Americas as a distinct landmass cleanly separated from Asia by the Pacific Ocean. He went on to print the first globe, create the first printed wall map of Europe, and append a set of maps to the 1513 edition of Ptolemy's Geography that's now considered the firs…
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Score breakdown
The six component signals behind the Fame score, and their ranks across the leaderboards.
Fame
Falling53.7
Composite of search demand, mentions, audience & graph footprint.
Score components
Historical22.7
Source confidence60.0
Completeness60.0
Receipts
Sources
- WikidataHigh confidencewikidata · wikidata.org
- WikipediaHigh confidencewikipedia · en.wikipedia.org
- Pantheon 2.0High confidencedatabase · pantheon.world
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