When it comes to biographies of premodern intellectuals, the market is hardly glutted. Yet, Andrew Taylor’s “The World of Gerard Mercator” (Walker and Co., 304 pages, $25) is the third book to appear on the 16th-century mapmaker in the past couple of years alone. Mercator was the first master of cartographic projection – the mathematical armature that determines the shape, direction, and proportion of the Earth’s geographic features on paper. Even those who now call his version of the world distorted or ethnocentric testify to the importance of his achievement.

The problem of capturing the three-dimensional Earth in two dimensions has confounded mapmakers since they first turned to the goal of objective representation in the late Middle Ages. For cartographers, the question has never been whether there will be distortions, but how to make signature inaccuracies less pronounced. In answer, mapmakers have attached themselves to very distinct cartographic ideals; indeed, there is now a different projection for almost every practical and doctrinal use-value imaginable.

Mercator catapulted cartography into the height of modernity with his first world map, published in 1569. But our devotion has lasted nearly 500 years. Today, having conquered the terrestrial Earth, he has moved on to the final frontier: NASA is using the famous projection to map Mars.

Mercator helped to revolutionize everything from global trade to war strategy. But if hard-earned discovery pointed the way to the future, his own life was much more mundane. Born in Flanders in 1518, he died in the German duchy of Cleve in 1594. Haunted by the plague and persecution as a Protestant during the Reformation (he was briefly thrown in jail), Mercator came through each twist of fate with a fresh resolve to elevate his life’s work. Mr. Taylor provides a fascinating review of Mercator’s life and achievements, even as he shows him to be the product of his cultural and social circumstances.

The author at times gives the sense that Mercator’s lasting legacy may simply be the work of historical serendipity: If he hadn’t hit upon this method, someone else would have. But they didn’t; he did. Gerard Mercator solved an intractable representational puzzle to the general satisfaction of the entire Western world, and so it’s his name we now revere or revile.