Here’s how it works. Walk into any school classroom and you will likely see a flat, rectangular map of the world sprawled across the wall. Generations of children have grown up learning that ...

The standard classroom maps we all learned geography from are based ... even developed an eponymous equation to quantify the degree of distortion that a world map experienced. Called Tissot’s ...

When many people picture a map of the world, what they're probably thinking of is a Mercator projection, a representation that despite its apparent distortions has been around more than 400 years.

If you have the most common world map internalized ... For the last 500 years, it could be found in atlases and on many classroom walls - but it distorts the size of countries and whole continents.

The map familiar to most American students—the Mercator projection—has been a fixture of classrooms and world atlases for nearly 500 years. It is also, by no small coincidence, full of ...