Try to wrap a football in aluminium foil and you will discover that you have to crumple up the foil to make it fit snugly to the ball. In the same way it is impossible to represent the curved surface ...

The African Union has joined a growing campaign to challenge centuries of cartographic distortion that has long diminished Africa’s true scale on world maps. The bloc of 55 nations recently endorsed ...

For centuries, the Mercator projection has been one of the most recognizable representations of the world. Developed in 1569 during the height of maritime exploration, it was engineered with a ...

Because the Earth is roughly spherical, every flat map distorts our planet one way or another. The most popular version is the Mercator projection, created by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in ...

When this world map was charted in the 1600s according to the Mercator’s projection, the idea was that ships could use the lines of longitude and latitude as a from of navigation. The flat map, ...

In classrooms, offices, and libraries across the United States, one world map appears again and again: the Mercator projection. Its familiarity makes it feel authoritative, even though it was never ...

The Mercator projection, a centuries-old map style from the age of sail, still prevails in the internet age. Here’s what the African Union wants to use instead ...