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 ...

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 Mercator projection of the world map is suited for marine navigation and once so commonplace that generations of schoolchildren thought Greenland was as large as Africa. Though out of fashion, it ...

In early 2013, James Talmage and Damon Maneice, two computer developers in Detroit, created an interactive map that shows the relative expanse of nations and continents. Partly inspired by the ...

Researchers have unveiled a new map of the world that shows a truer representation of the continents’ sizes. Cartographers throughout the centuries have come up with all sorts of ways to project Earth ...

OUR map of the world hasn’t changed much in centuries. It seems to be set in stone. The thing is, it’s not accurate. When this world map was charted in the 1600s according to the Mercator’s projection ...

Images and text are drawn from “Mapping It Out: An Alternative Atlas of Contemporary Cartographies,” edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist, out July 15th from Thames & Hudson. Now, this is where the problems ...

Google has today celebrated the birthday of Gerard Mercator, a 16th century cartographer, with a Doodle on its homepage. The Flemish map-maker is behind one of the most influential depictions of the ...

New Delhi: Member states of the African Union, on 15 August, signed a petition for the world to ‘reject’ the Mercator map projection and accept a more equitable projection that “more accurately ...

The African Union is championing a drive to replace the 16th-century Mercator world map, arguing its widespread use by governments and international bodies inaccurately depicts Africa's true scale.