About

This project was made by Carsten Miller, Executive Director of the Center for Mobile Learning with Digital Technology (CMLDT) at the University of Bayreuth — a research institution of the faculty of mathematics, physics and computer science, and the place JSXGraph itself comes from.

A word on where the author is standing: I am a mathematician, not a geographer. So if a term is used loosely somewhere, or a cartographer would have put something differently, that is why — and I would be glad to hear about it.

The immediate occasion was the current argument about whether world maps show countries at a fair size. On 4 September 2026 the UN General Assembly adopted resolution A/RES/80/307, brought by Togo and the African Union under the “Correct the Map” campaign, by 164 votes to one with six abstentions. It encourages governments, schools and technology companies to use the Equal Earth projection and other equal-area projections where relative size matters, and to teach the limits of any flat map of a round planet.

The resolution is not binding and bans nothing. What it asks for is the second half of that sentence as much as the first: not simply a different sheet, but an understanding of why every sheet misrepresents something. That is what these pages are for. The projections page shows twelve of them and what each one keeps, the Tissot circles show what each does to shape and size, and the globe is there as the case that needs no compromise — because it is not flat. It is still a sphere, while the Earth is a slightly flattened ellipsoid, but that difference is a few tenths of a percent.

Mercator is not the villain of the piece. It preserves angles and draws a constant course as a straight line, which is exactly what a navigator needs and why it has lasted since the 16th century. Used as a general-purpose world map, it enlarges everything far from the equator — Greenland, Europe, North America — so that Africa, lying across the equator, looks far smaller than it is by comparison.

The core of it was vibe-coded on a North Sea beach, on an iPhone. Not a bad place to think about the shape of the Earth, and a surprising amount of what is here survived the trip home.

Back at a proper keyboard it went through a second pass, module by module, this time measuring things rather than trusting how they looked.

Geographic data

Natural Earth at 1:110 million, public domain. Generalised for display at world scale, so coastlines are simplified.

Rendering

JSXGraph, under LGPL-3.0 and MIT.

Equal Earth

Devised in 2018 by Bojan Šavrič, Tom Patterson and Bernhard Jenny, as an equal-area projection that avoids the shape distortion of Gall–Peters.