Ernst Georg Ravenstein

Ernst Georg Ravenstein (Ernest George) (30 December 1834 – 13 March 1913) was a German-English geographer cartographer. As a geographer he was less of a traveller than a researcher; his studies led mainly in the direction of cartography and the history of geography.

Ravenstein was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, to a family of cartographers. He spent most of his adult life in England in a house at Lorn Road, Lambeth, but he died in Germany, his country of birth, on 13 March 1913.

When he was 18 years old he became a pupil of Dr. August Heinrich Petermann. After moving to England, Ravenstein became a naturalised British Subject and was in the service of the Topographical Department of the British War Office for 20 years, from 1855 to 1875. A long-serving member of the councils of the Royal Statistical and Royal Geographical Societies, he was also Professor of Geography at Bedford College in 1882–83. He was the first to receive the Victoria gold medal of the Royal Geographical Society (1902) for "his efforts during 40 years to introduce scientific methods into the cartography of the United Kingdom".

His geographical statistics and projections were respected and used as a basis for official planning at the time.

His Systematic Atlas (1884) put into practice many his ideas as to methods of teaching cartography. The Philips's World Atlas was published with Ravenstein's plates and statistics for several decades. His Map of Equatorial Africa (1884) was the most notable map of a large part of the continent on a large scale that had been made up to that time, and he immediately developed it as new discoveries were made in Central and Eastern Africa.

Ravenstein also published:

In the late 19th century, he estimates the current World Population at the time. He also moderately estimates a possible maximum World population that can be sustained by Earth's resources, in the year 2072.

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