The Gall-Peters Projection

Unsatisfied by the distorted view of the world that dominated the Western mind in the form of the Mercator Projection, James Gall and, later, Arno Peters engineered a new map in the 19th and 20th centuries. Based on a mathematical formula that Gall first proposed in the 19th century, Peters projected an image of the world that attempted to capture the size of objects relative to each other. However, this map had its own problems in that it distorts geographical relationships by distorting shapes of countries and continents. In the end, all map projections distort something simply because of the mathematics of reproducing a sphere (the world) on a flat piece of paper (the map).

This source is a part of the Analyzing Maps methods module.