The azimuthal orthographic is thousands of years old. In the first century, Ptolemy described how a geographer named Hipparchus used the projection, which he called the analemma, to map the globe.

By their calculations, the Mercator projection scores 8.296 and Winkel Tripel does better at 4.563. Their own azimuthal equidistant double-sided projection, meanwhile, scores 0.881. “We believe ...

In simple terms, a polar panoramic, or stereographic projection, is a way to map a sphere as a plane. We could throw around some ridiculous math words like azimuthal, bijective and isometry ...