![]() Which brings us to this attempt to fit an oblate spheroid peg into a two-dimensional hole. Take a large scale globe with you on your travels and instead of a conquistador, the natives might think you were a pilates instructor.īut the problem of map projection – portraying a sphere’s surface on a plane – has existed for as long as the knowledge that one can’t sail off the edge of the world, and in the early 19th Century, Gauss’s Theorema Egregium proved once and for all that a sphere’s surface couldn’t be represented on a plane without distortion. However, maps are often more useful than globes – they fold for convenient transport, they can be laid out flat for simple perusal, and they can be easily made at a vast range of different scales. Ptolemy’s world map of 150CE, despite a mistaken measure of the earth’s circumference, is clearly based on a sphere with lines of longitude and latitude to record its coordinates, and contrary to popular belief, even in the dark ages hardly anyone thought that the earth was flat. The concept of a spherical earth dates back as least as far as the 6th century BCE, and is commonly attributed to Pythagoras. ![]()
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