Professor Dr. h.c. Eduard Imhof zum 70. Geburtstag

Summary

This article by Karl-Heinz Meine marks the seventieth birthday of the cartographer Eduard Imhof. It traces his career chronologically: born in 1895 in Schiers, Graubünden, he studied topography at ETH Zurich, became an associate professor there in 1925 and full professor in 1949, and headed ETH's Division of Cultural Engineering and Surveying in 1952–1956 and 1962–1964. In 1930 he joined a Sun Yat-sen University expedition to western Sichuan to carry out cartographic surveys; Arnold Heim recorded the sinking of a Chinese steamer during the journey. The article lists his editorship of the Swiss secondary-school atlas from 1924, his 1927–1934 work on the design of the new Swiss national maps and the foundations of his generalization theory for topographic maps, his 1939–1944 facsimile editions of the oldest printed map of Switzerland (1513) and the Gyger map of Zurich (1667), and his 1962 appointment by the Swiss Federal Council as editor-in-chief of the Atlas of Switzerland. Honors include an honorary doctorate from the University of Zurich in 1949, election as provisional president of the International Cartographic Working Group (IKV) at Mainz in 1958 and as its president in Paris in 1961, the Sven Hedin gold medal in 1964, and the David Livingstone gold medal of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society. Meine calls Imhof the doyen of cartography and credits his work on relief representation and thematic cartography. An editorial note states that the bibliography of Imhof's principal works, lost before publication, will appear in a later issue.