The Boston public school system just changed the world for its students-by changing its maps. The depiction of the spherical earth on flat paper is known as a projection. Now all Boston's new social studies classroom maps will use the Peters projection instead of the more familiar Mercator. The Peters, published in 1974 by the German historian Arno Peters as a cartographic antidote to Eurocentrism, is an "equal area" pro- jection. This means that the relative areas of continents shown on the map are preserved, though their shapes are distorted. Landform area ratio versus shape is a trade-off all map projections face: The Peters shows Africa and South America as much larger, though vertically stretched, than they appear in the Mercator. The Mercator gets the continents' shapes right but their areas (relative to other land-forms on the map) wrong. It shows Africa and Greenland as similar in size, though Africa is actually almost 14 times larger.
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