From Butterflies to Maps Hessler’s path to mathematical cartography began with butterflies.
“The minute I saw one of the portolans, I was interested in its structure,” Hessler says.Many modern maps solve this problem by using so-called Mercator projections, which turn the lines of latitude parallel to the equator and the lines of longitude that converge at the Earth’s poles into a tidy grid of perpendicular lines on a flat plane.What Hessler saw on the portolan chart was a different solution: a seemingly random pattern of lines showing the 16 directions (north, northeast, east-northeast and so on), spreading out from various locations.The less energy required, the more similar the positions of the spots — and, perhaps, the more closely related the butterflies.When his adventure in the Alps ended, Hessler’s newfound mapping expertise landed him a job as a curator at the Library of Congress, where one of his duties was to maintain the vault that holds the institution’s most rare and important maps.
The story of Christ's death and resurrection seemed merely an echo of hundreds of similar myths compiled in James Frazer's . This argument is what finally persuaded Lewis to convert.