Martin Waldseemüller

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 first modern atlas. He died on 16 March 1520, having drawn the lines the world still traces.