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@nevereverdave.bsky.social Sep 5, 2026, 10:21 AM

Really caught my attention this morning as someone who got excited about Peter's World Map or #PetersProjection circa mid 1970s Wikipedia have an excellent piece on it. Cartographers strop etc too. 🙂 #Amnesty I think sold the maps in shops & mail order. With satellite scanning of the planet 1/2

The Gall–Peters projection is a rectangular, equal-area map projection.

Like all equal-area projections, it distorts most shapes.

It is a cylindrical equal-area projection with latitudes 45° north and

south as the regions on the map that have no distortion.

The projection is named after James Gall and Arno Peters.

Gall described the projection in 1855 at a science convention and

published a paper on it in 1885. Peters brought the projection to a wider

audience beginning in the early 1970s through his "Peters World Map".

The name "Gall–Peters projection" was first used by Arthur H. Robinson

in a pamphlet put out by the American Cartographic Association in 1986.

The Gall–Peters projection achieved notoriety in the late 20th century

as the centerpiece of a controversy about the political implications

of map design.

Adoption

Maps based on the projection are promoted by UNESCO, and they are

also widely used by British schools. The U.S. state of Massachusetts

and Boston Public Schools began phasing in these maps in March 2017,

becoming the first public school district and state in the United States

to adopt Gall–Peters maps as their standard.

Until its dissolution in 2020, Amherst-based ODT Maps Inc. was the

exclusive North American publisher of Peters and Hobo–Dyer projection

maps.

On April 16, 2024, Nebraska Governor Jim Pillen signed a law that

requires public schools to display maps based on the Gall–Peters

projection, a similar cylindrical equal-area projection, or the

AuthaGraph projection beginning in the 2024–2025 school year.

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