Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1698-1759), the French philosopher, mathematician and geodesist, has inscribed his name in the history of our planet for all time. He was sent out by the French Academy of Sciences to determine, with as exact measurements as possible, the shape of the Earth at the poles. This took place between 1736-7, when his expedition spent almost exactly one year in the area of the Gulf of Bothnia. The measurements were performed in the northernmost regions of Europe, in areas that people in the cultural centres of Europe considered more or less inhabitable: namely, immediately north and south of the Arctic Circle in Sweden.