Eduard Imhof, einer der Wegbereiter der theoretischen Kartographie, 90 Jahre

Summary

This is R. Ogrissek's tribute to Eduard Imhof on his ninetieth birthday. It sketches Imhof's career: encouraged in the geosciences by his father, he studied geodesy at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich from 1914 to 1919, stayed on as a scientific assistant, gave his own cartographic courses, was appointed associate professor in 1925, and established a cartographic institute that gained worldwide reputation. His work combined theory and practice and covered a broad field—terrain and relief representation, especially high-mountain cartography, atlas cartography, thematic cartography, relief production and historical studies. The occasion prompts the author to re-examine Imhof's 1956 article in this journal on the tasks and methods of theoretical cartography. He discusses Imhof's division into theoretical and practical cartography; the generalization problem, opening with the axiom that all map drawing is generalization, and argues that the still-unsatisfactory state of automated map production stems largely from long-standing underestimation of theoretical work on generalization; the coordination problem, concerning the interaction of map elements in content, drawing and printing, now to be seen as structural optimization; the visual effect, covering perception effects such as geometric-optical illusions in map reading; relief representation, including the 'Swiss manner' and Imhof's five-point efforts to improve it; and thematic mapping, exemplified by population density, where Imhof criticized cartographic methodology as still in its infancy and many solutions as arbitrary and distorted. The author notes that later monographs by Arnberger, Kelnhofer, Witt and others have improved matters in some respects, and endorses Imhof's 1956 conclusion as still fully valid in 1985.