According to Wilhelm Schmidt in an article printed in Professional Surveying Magazine, surveying is an art because it is a process of making something while using instruments. The surveyor's instruments are his mathematical knowledge of geometry and trigonometry along with the electronic measuring devices, chains, and compasses to produce a survey of the property. A surveyor learns the mathematical principles under the sterilized, textbook world of a university and then apply his knowledge to the real world where nothing corresponds to the standard "rules" learned in school.
Schmidt believes that the artistic part of surveying lies in the surveyor's decisions in choosing the equipment, mathematical principles, past surveys, and legal descriptions to achieve a high degree of accuracy while making sense out the chaos of life. A surveyor must deal with monuments located in the wrong place or destroyed. He must make decisions based on unreadable plats or recorded legal descriptions with typographical or mathematical errors while basing his survey on a fence line that may or may not of moved since the last survey of the property in the early 1900's. Surveying is very much an art based on the interpretation of historical fact.
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