This exhibit explores the science of cartography and the geometry of the sphere. The geometric properties of the sphere and the plane are essentially different, and no map can faithfully represent the Earth without distortion. This module goes through some of these properties, comparing different map projections and trying to get a feeling of what “distortion” means and why is there such impossibility for a “perfect map”.

This interactive module illustrates, in a historical context, the rhumb lines on the Earth and the spirals that correspond to a remarkable family of their projections in the plane.

Surfer Shuffle is an algebraic surfaces random generator based on the jsurf project.