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Princeton astrophysicists re-imagine world map (2021)
Princeton Professors J. Richard Gott and Robert Vanderbei, in collaboration with David Goldberg of Drexel University, have designed a two-sided disk that minimizes the flaws of traditional flat maps.
The Winkel Tripel projection, chosen by the National Geographic for its world maps, represents the poles more accurately than the Mercator, but it still distorts Antarctica badly and creates the illusion that Japan is hugely to the east of California, instead of its nearest neighbor to the west. Gott drew a comparison to Olympic high jumpers: In 1968, Dick Fosbury shocked sports fans by arching his back and jumping over the bar backwards. By comparison, in the Mercator and Winkel Tripel projections, as well as others, distance errors become enormous approaching the poles and essentially infinite from the left to the right margins (which are far apart on the map but directly adjacent on the globe).
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