Reading about Plato’s thoughts on irrational numbers, I came across this, “Plato was profoundly interested in the subject…he says the general ignorance on this subject is disgraceful…” (Bertrand Russell’s The History of Western Philosophy).
About 10 years ago I would have said, or rather I did say, much the same thing about cartography. But reflecting on this tonight I have to say that tremendous progress has occurred in all aspects of cartography: software, design, general geography skills, and ubiquity of mapping products spanning all kinds of important subjects. (The possible exception to this is geo analytical theory, which was already advanced a decade ago, though arguably not practiced enough.)
Now the question is do we continue to teach, learn, and discover the art and science of cartography or are we done here?*
*I’m not done. It’s just a rhetorical question. 
#1 by Andras Bogdanovits on September 8, 2014 - 10:56 pm
Hi Gretchen,
Cartography is a science. You have a perfect question. Should you ask now or 200 years ago and you will be able to ask it in the future. same question with similar answers. But. A scientific revolution occurs, according to Kuhn, when scientists encounter anomalies which cannot be explained by the universally accepted paradigm.
Cheers
Andras
#2 by Mike Foster on September 9, 2014 - 8:58 am
Cartography, and the greater geo-sciences are never ‘done’, but this question I fear has dangerously haunted cartography and geography over the years. Perhaps summed by the common cocktail ethos of ‘But haven’t we already mapped everything?’, cartographers and geographers need to be careful to not grow complacent, or we will get lapped in our own field by technologists and specialists from other data driven science and technical fields. Technologies are advancing faster than ever before and each one, ideally, should be assessed by members of our field itself as a new opportunity in which to expand cartographic thought and method.
PS I know you aren’t done
#3 by G.P. on September 10, 2014 - 12:15 pm
Good points Mike and Andras. I’d like to think that my 1st book on cartographic design, which was published in 2009, will be looked at 20 years from now with the same sense of archaicness that this one from 1991 on Digital Cartography evokes now. That would mean that a huge amount of change (for the better) will occur between 2009 and 2034. Interactive mapping environments, dynamic projections, every nuance of the solar system in geodata format? Who knows what the future will bring.