Boston Public Schools Map Switch Aims To Amend 500 Years of Distortion (theguardian.com)

Students attending Boston public schools are now getting a more accurate depiction of the world after the school district rolled out a new standard map of the world that show North America and Europe much smaller than Africa and South America. From a report on The Guardian: In an age of "fake news" and "alternative facts", city authorities are confident their new map offers something closer to the geographical truth than that of traditional school maps, and hope it can serve an example to schools across the nation and even the world. For almost 500 years, the Mercator projection has been the norm for maps of the world, ubiquitous in atlases, pinned on peeling school walls. Gerardus Mercator, a renowned Flemish cartographer, devised his map in 1569, principally to aid navigation along colonial trade routes by drawing straight lines across the oceans. An exaggeration of the whole northern hemisphere, his depiction made North America and Europe bigger than South America and Africa. He also placed western Europe in the middle of his map. Mercator's distortions affect continents as well as nations. For example, South America is made to look about the same size as Europe, when in fact it is almost twice as large, and Greenland looks roughly the size of Africa when it is actually about 14 times smaller.

Comments

oblig xkcd

[irussel]

https://xkcd.com/977/

Distortion is fact.

[Dishevel]

You must have some type of distortion when projecting a map of a globe on a flat plane.
The school has just decided that it wants one type of distortion instead of another.

Projections matter

[Geoffrey.landis]

I agree; Mercator's projection is not deliberately designed to minimize Africa. That is incidental. But, nevertheless, it is a side effect. As a kid, I was always puzzled as to why Australia is a continent, but Greenland not, when on the map Greenland is clearly larger.

I'm a fan of the Lambert cylindrical equal-area projection, which seems to be geometrically very clear and straightforward, although it has a odd (pi to 1) aspect ratio.

And, of course, the obligatory xkcd.