Pragmatic Quincuncial Cartography

Matt McIrvin, on a quest to figure out when the USA was displaced from the center of the world (at least where map-makers are concerned), points to a fascinating map projection site put together by Carlos Furuti. It goes through all the different ways people have thought of to project a spherical Earth onto a flat map, doing their darndest to preserve nice features like shapes and sizes. Only after looking at all these different attempts does it really hit you how distorting most world maps are, if only because the nice features of one will draw attention to the glaring shortcomings of some other one. Round spheres are really quite geometrically different from flat planes -- who knew? My favorite projection is the Quincuncial Projection shown below. It is "conformal" (angle-preserving) almost everywhere, except at the four points where the Equator takes a dramatic right turn. These are also ...