TechWire

Tag - projection

How maps are made!

Have you ever thought of how maps are made into a flat surface? Can you cut a ball and show me the surface of the ball as a plane? No, you can’t. Then, you may have to make some amendments to do so.

The surface of the sphere cannot be represented as a plane without any distortion. Carl Friedrich Gauss has mathematically proven this. So, long time ago mathematicians have implemented algorithms to achieve this. For that, they used a process called Projection.

Popular rectangular maps are created with cylinder core projections. That is by putting the globe into a cylinder and projecting each point of the globe to the cylinder surface.

You can project the globe also to other objects, and that will affect the way the map looks.

All these projection methods come with trade-offs such as distance, direction, and land area. Those different maps can be used for different kind of purposes.

Read More