The Dymaxion Map
Move over, Mollweide projection, I have a new favorite world map.
All maps of the globe are fundamentally flawed – there’s no way to project the surface of a sphere onto a flat map without distorting it somehow.* The best a mapmaker can do is try to minimize distortion while still keeping the map readable. Over the years dozens of projections have been designed to meet those needs.
In the 1940s, Buckminster Fuller (architect, futurist, and one of my all-time favorite people) designed the Dymaxion projection, which maps the globe onto an icosahedron and unfolds it. This spreads the distortion somewhat evenly around the globe (avoiding the “Greenland is bigger than Africa” problem) and also avoids chopping up any landmasses. Wikipedia has a really neat animation of the mapping and unfolding process.
I’d imagine you could get as little distortion as you liked by using geodesic spheres with increasing numbers of triangles, but that would involve a lot more continental division.
The Dymaxion projection is kinda similar to J.S. Cahill’s “Butterfly projection,” but his doesn’t involve a Platonic solid, so it’s clearly less wonderful (and less mathable).
* As usual, Gauss can tell you why.
This entry was posted on Thursday, January 1st, 2009 at 11:00 pm and is filed under art+design, maps, math. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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