Ever wondered why Greenland looks as big as Africa on the map? It’s because of something called the Mercator projection. Putting a 3-D planet on a two-dimensional world map was challenging for early ...

Are you sitting down? The world map you’re probably most familiar with has been misleading you in a subtle but important way: many land masses appear either smaller or larger than they actually are.

From a small island in the Venetian lagoon, a 15th-Century monk somehow designed an astonishingly accurate planisphere of the world. On the second floor of the Library of Saint Mark in Venice, a map ...