Arthur H. Robinson

Arthur H. Robinson was an American geographer and cartographer whose work shaped thematic map design and produced the Robinson world map projection.

Robinson projection: A compromise world map projection designed by Arthur H. Robinson to present the globe in a visually balanced form. Its 1963 design became Robinson’s best-known cartographic contribution.
Geography: The study of Earth’s places, environments, and relationships between people and their surroundings. Robinson trained and worked within this discipline while advancing cartographic scholarship.
John Paul Goode: An American geographer and cartographer known for the Goode homolosine projection and a widely used school atlas. Goode’s projection offered an influential alternative to Robinson’s world map.
Mercator projection: A cylindrical conformal map projection that preserves local angles but greatly enlarges areas near the poles. Unlike Robinson’s compromise projection, Mercator prioritizes local shape and direction.
Choropleth map: A thematic map that uses differences in shading or color to represent values across geographic areas. Robinson’s design principles inform the legibility of this common thematic map form.
Thematic cartography: The design and study of maps that show the spatial distribution of particular subjects or phenomena. Robinson’s writing and teaching helped establish its modern practice.
Map projection: A mathematical method for representing Earth’s curved surface on a flat map. Understanding projections clarifies the problem Robinson addressed with his world map.
Erwin Raisz: A Hungarian-American cartographer known for influential hand-drawn maps and geomorphological cartography. Raisz’s expressive approach shows another major direction in twentieth-century American cartography.
Winkel tripel projection: A compromise world map projection that balances distortion in area, direction, and distance. National Geographic replaced Robinson’s projection with Winkel tripel for its world maps in 1998.
Dot distribution map: A thematic map that uses dots to represent the presence or quantity of geographic phenomena. It illustrates the kinds of spatial patterns thematic cartography organizes and communicates.

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Waldo R. ToblerRelated: Robinson’s cartographic scholarship provides a contemporaneous point of comparison for Tobler’s work.