Mercator's Projection: A Comparative Analysis of Rhumb Lines and Great Circles
This paper provides an overview of the Mercator map projection. We examine how to map spherical and ellipsoidal Earth onto 2 dimensional space, and compare two paths one can take between two points on the earth: the great circle path and the rhumb line path. In looking at these two paths, we will investigate how latitude and longitude play an important role in the proportional difference between the two paths.