Edward S. Kennedy, 1996, Mathematical geography, in Roshdi Rashed, ed., Encyclopedia of the History of Arabic Science, Vol. 1, Routledge, London and New York. From the registered patent, he never mentioned that the Earth is flat. On the contrary, he said that he made the map from a globe, which explains how a north-pole centered azimuthal equidistant map is designed. References

Flat Earth - Great Circle Routes on Gleason Map – GeoGebra Flat Earth - Great Circle Routes on Gleason Map – GeoGebra

Previously, Goldberg and I identified six critical error types a flat map can have: local shapes, areas, distances, flexion (bending), skewness (lopsidedness) and boundary cuts. These are illustrated by the famous Mercator projection, the base template for Google maps. It has perfect local shapes but is bad at depicting areas. Greenland appears as large as South America even though it covers only one seventh the area on the globe. A disadvantage of the new map is that you can’t see all of the Earth’s surface at once, but remember this is true for the globe as well. Our map is actually more like the globe in this respect than other flat maps. To see all of the globe, you have to rotate it; to see all of the new map, you simply have to flip it over, as you can see belowGleason’s map could conceptually be made by placing a flat horizontal paper just above a translucent globe whose north pole is at the top; then placing a bright LED at the south pole and making each feature according to where its shadow falls on the paper,” Goldhaber-Gordon said. With the circumference of the Earth being approximately 40,000km (24,855mi), the maximum distance that can be displayed on an azimuthal equidistant projection map is half the circumference, or about 20,000km (12,427mi). For distances less than 10,000km (6,214mi) distortions are minimal. For distances 10,000–15,000km (6,214–9,321mi) the distortions are moderate. Distances greater than 15,000km (9,321mi) are severely distorted. Goldhaber-Gordon added that this experiment would show that “locations close to the south pole appear far apart on the map,” although that is not the reality. Purple circles: 15,000 km radius circles Applications [ edit ] An azimuthal equidistant projection centered on Sydney

New correct map of the flat surface, stationary earth

From the map’s patent, we know the author was aware and in full knowledge that the map was just a projection of the spherical Earth, contradictory to the claims in his book. One can’t make everything perfect. The Mercator map has a boundary cut error: one makes a cut of 180 degrees along the meridian of the international date line from pole to pole and unrolls the Earth’s surface, thus putting Hawaii on the far-left side of the map and Japan on the far-right side of the map creating an additional distance error in the process. A pilot flying a great circle route straight from New York to Tokyo passes over northern Alaska. His route looks bent on a Mercator map—a flexion error. North America is lopsided to the north: Canada is bigger than it should be, and Mexico is too small. All these errors are important. Ignoring one of them can lead you to bad-looking maps no one would prefer.

Scientific American is part of Springer Nature, which owns or has commercial relations with thousands of scientific publications (many of them can be found at www.springernature.com/us). Scientific American maintains a strict policy of editorial independence in reporting developments in science to our readers. Anyone who cares can make observations (of the moon’s phases, of time zones, of constellations) that can all be understood in the context of a round earth but would be hard to explain otherwise without separate reasons for each observation,” he added, VERDICT Snyder, John P.; Voxland, Philip M. (1989). An Album of Map Projections. Professional Paper 1453. Denver: USGS. p.228. ISBN 978-0160033681. Archived from the original on 2010-07-01 . Retrieved 2018-03-29. An interactive Java Applet to study the metric deformations of the Azimuthal Equidistant Projection. Thanks for reading Scientific American. Create your free account or Sign in to continue. Create Account