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 firs…