They create a map of the world in an amazing, but more accurate form.

One of the major problems that cartographers face when trying to depict the spherical surface of the Earth on a plane is surface distortion. Over the years, projections such as the Mercator, developed in the 16th century to facilitate transoceanic shipping, or the Winkel-Triepel, which uses National Geographic Society, They have tried to solve this problem with more or less success.

However, the latest attempt to solve this problem has resulted in the creation of a world map that has never been seen before: disk shaped card and which represents the northern hemisphere in one circle and the southern hemisphere in the other. Although it is not a perfect map of the world, the authors claim that this reproduction is the most accurate one created to date. “You can’t do everything perfectly,” says Richard Gott, one of the two people responsible for the map.

According to the portal, in 2007 HatakaGoldberg and Gott invented a system for evaluating existing maps, taking into account six types of distortions that planar maps can introduce: local shapes, areas, distances, bending (curvature), asymmetry (deflection), and boundary cuts (spaces of continuity). ). The lower the score, the better: the globe will have a score of 0.0.

However, the accuracy of this new proposal is achieved because David Goldberg and Richard Gott used a trick: they took the continuity variable into account. So, instead of presenting the traditional cross-section between Asia and Oceania and the Americas, the authors of this map turned it into a disk, as this reduces the distortions that can occur in this particular area.

Your new card is double-sided and round, like a gramophone record or vinyl record. Like many radical events, in retrospect this seems obvious. Why not have a two-sided map that shows both sides of the globe? It goes beyond two dimensions without losing the convenience of a flat map. “It’s a card you can hold in your hand,” Gott says.

This double-sided map has smaller distance errors than any single-sided flat map; the previous record was a 2007 map compiled by Gott and Charles Mugnolo, a 2005 Princeton graduate. . By comparison, in the Mercator and Winkel Tripel projections, as well as others, the distance errors become enormous as you approach the poles and are virtually infinite from left to right fields (which are far apart on the map but immediately adjacent). globe). Moreover, the area at the edges is only 1.57 times larger than at the center.

As far as they know, no one has ever created double-sided maps with such precision. The 1993 collection of about 200 map projections dating back 2,000 years did not include any, and no similar patents were found. “Our map looks more like a globe than other flat maps,” Gott said. “To see the whole globe, you need to turn it; to see our entire new map, you just have to flip it over.”