Nicolas Auguste Tissot

Nicolas Auguste Tissot (/tiˈsoʊ/; 1824–1897) was a 19th-century French cartographer, who in 1859 and 1881 published an analysis of the distortion that occurs on map projections. He devised Tissot's indicatrix, or distortion circle, which when plotted on a map will appear as an ellipse whose elongation depends on the amount of distortion by the map at that point. The angle and extent of the elongation represents the amount of angular distortion of the map. The size of the ellipse indicates the amount that the area is distorted.

Born in Nancy, Meurthe-et-Moselle, France, Tissot was trained as an engineer in the French Army, from which he graduated as capitaine du génie. In the early 1860s he became an instructor in geodesy at the well-reputed Ecole Polytechnique in Paris. Around the same time, he indulged a research program meant to determine the best way of cartographic projection for a particular region and presented his findings to the French Académie des Sciences.

In the eighteenth century, the German cartographer Johann H. Lambert had enunciated a mathematical theory of map projections and of the attendant characteristics of distortions that any given projection involved. Carl Friedrich Gauss had also studied the subject before Tissot's contributions later in the nineteenth century.

Tissot's research in the mid-1850s on methods for finding good projections for particular regions led him to develop a projection that he saw as optimal. While not quite equal-area or conformal, his projection resulted in “negligible distortion for a very small region.” Subsequently, his optimal projection was adopted by the geographic service of the French Army. While his first concepts regarding cartographic distortions developed in mid-century, it was only with the publication of Mémoire sur la représentation des surfaces et les projections des cartes géographiques in 1881 that the Tissot’s Indicatrix became popular. In the book, Tissot argued for his method, reportedly demonstrating that “whatever the system of transformation, there is at each point on the spherical surface at least one pair of orthogonal directions which will also be orthogonal on the projection.”

...
Wikipedia