Tissot's Indicatrix

alex

Jul 23, 2024 — 1 min read

So the other day I was reading about a VPN service and the blog post had a sidebar about maps and mercator projections. A quick detour down the Wikipedia later, I discovered Tissot's Indicatrix. tl;dr - it's circles that show the distortion when projecting a globe (earth) onto a rectangle. Bigger circles go over the areas that are big on a rectangular map but actually smaller on a globe.

undefined — Fancy circles for the Mercator projection. Check out the gallery for more.

It makes sense in hindsight, but I was still mildly surprised at the level of distortion in a "regular" world map. But also I love it because: 1) of course this is a thing, and 2) Tissot could have done a lot worse for having something named after him.

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