Common projections shrink the size of Africa, but experts have long debated whether creating a precise map is possible.

"Every world map is distorted in some respect," Matthew ... a sphere with a flattened top and bottom and a bulge along the equator. This has, since the dawn of mapping, presented a major problem ...

See, the world maps we’ve been using for centuries don ... but it makes landmasses further from the equator appear larger than they actually are. The Gall-Peters projection map addressed ...

When this world map was charted in the 1600s ... isn’t perfect either as certain regions appear stretched along the equator and at the poles. But Murray Godfrey, publishing director of ...

Areas near both the equator and prime meridian are accurate, but the distortion gets worse the further you go from either. This attempt at creating a faithful world map took a similar tack to the ...

Flat maps, designed to offer a consistent representation of Earth, reveal inaccuracies in countries' sizing. Some nations near the Poles appear significantly larger than they truly are, while ...

resulting in the equator being 2/3 the way down the map." All this adds up to a view of the world that sets one set of cultures center stage, while marginalizing and even radically shrinking others.

However, the popular Mercator world map distorts shapes and sizes as you move away from the equator. According to Dr Jayasuriya, Mercator's version is "extremely bad" for depicting the relative ...

Think ‘world map’ and your mind probably jumps to the ... “For example, Mercators projection is true to scale only along the equator, and azimuthal projection is limited to convergence ...