Every map starts with the same lie: The earth is flat. The globe isn’t a portable, affordable, or even satisfying way to look at the world, so these exaggerations are necessary. However, mapmakers ...

The America you see above is a proud country. Its northwestern border is arched like a subtly confident grin. The scrawl from Minnesota to Maine looks like a doctor's confident signature. East and ...

Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. is a reporter with five years of experience covering consumer tech releases, EU tech policy, online platforms, ...

How do you flatten a sphere? For centuries, mapmakers have agonized over how to accurately display our round planet on anything other than a globe. Now, a fundamental re-imagining of how maps can work ...

MR. STEERS's useful little book on map projections, the third edition of which has recently been issued, is written for those students of geography who have only the most elementary knowledge of ...

THIS little book is, in the main, what it professes to be, and is written chiefly for those students of geography who have but little knowledge of mathematics. For that reason the study is cast ...

We recently came across this article about a recently released map of average cloud cover for the last 13 years produced by NASA. Do any of our readers know of an easy way to convert global images ...

How distorting are map projections? Here’s what four commonly used systems of projection do to a human head. From the 1921 publication Elements in Map Projection comes this striking demonstration of ...

Ever since we discovered Earth was round, mapmakers have struggled to create a map that accurately shows our planet in 2D. Most notably, Africa always ends up appearing far smaller than it actually is ...

I usually work on general relativity and cosmology. I have always loved geometrical things. As a kid I was fascinated by map projections. When I was 14, I made a painted globe of Mars based on a flat ...