Dear Calvin College,

I would like to comment on a certain map I have seen around campus in the history and sociology departments. (It may be in others, but these are the ones I’ve seen.) The maps I have seen there use the Peters projection, which touts itself as the projection to use in order to correct social injustice. It makes sense that the history and sociology departments want to be as socially just as possible. But please do not believe the Peters projection marketing campaign (yes, there’s a marketing campaign for a map projection) when they say it’s the only map projection that corrects the evils of the Mercator.

First of all, the reasons they claim the Peters is the best are that it’s equal-area, and that the equator is in the middle. That’s it, and both those things are true of many other (better-looking) maps. Almost all world maps have the equator in the middle. The reason the Mercator sometimes doesn’t is because if it included the whole map, Antarctica would be obscenely large. (Mercator projections usually don’t reach all the way to the North Pole, either.) As for equal-area, that is one of two mutually exclusive properties of map projections, the other being conformality, or accuracy of shape. Therefore, there are many, many world maps that are equal-area. If you really need a perfectly equal-area world map for social justice purposes, then I recommend the beautiful Mollweide projection, which has the added bonus of not having been plagiarized.

The Peters projection was actually created by James Gall about a century before Arno Peters developed it. He probably was not aware of Gall’s work until after he published his map, but he refused to credit Gall for a long time after the error was pointed out to him. Additionally, he licensed his projection (such that it requires a fee to use), which is almost never done, and he repeatedly lied about his map. He said it had no major distortions in shape, when it is worse in that regard than most other equal-area maps, and that the map preserved distance, which is extremely false, as even conformal world maps are not perfect at preserving distances.

So, history and sociology departments, please don’t propagate the lies about this horribly ugly map. There are beautiful equal-area world maps out there, such as the Mollweide that I mentioned earlier, and the Waterman Butterfly. What could go wrong with a butterfly shaped map?

And then there’s the Bonne heart-shaped projection, which I still think someone should photoshop into the Calvin logo.

Regards,

Christina Bohnet (Class of 2019)