Atlantic navigation is the earliest example of a systematic scientific large project, sustained over many decades, studying the currents and winds of the Atlantic.

The work of Pedro Nunes (1502-1578) is remembered in the navigation context for the determination of the loxodromic curve: the shortest course between two points on the surface of a sphere represented onto a two-dimensional map. When he published his "Treatise of the Sphere" (1537), mostly a commentated translation of earlier work by others,