MONICA K. HURDAL Creating Flat Maps Phone: +1 850 644-7183 Fax: +1 850 644-4053 E-mail: mhurdal@math.fsu.edu

Back to an overivew of flat mapping and pictures of flat maps of the cerebellum created in the Euclidean and hyperbolic planes and on a sphere or to more spherical maps.

To give you an idea of what it means to create a flat map in the hyperbolic plane and the resulting distortion, here are some examples of quasi-conformal flat maps of the western hemisphere of the Earth. The map on the left is of the western hemisphere in the hyperbolic plane, centered around Tallahassee, Florida. Centering the same hyperbolic map around the southern point of Chile gives a completely different picture. Notice how there is lots of distortion around the edges of the map, with Antarctica enlarged at the bottom of the map, and North America squashed near the top of the map.

Here is a (hemi)spherical quasi-conformal map of the western hemisphere.

Back to an overview of flat mapping and pictures of flat maps or to more spherical maps.

I would like to thank Kirt Schaper and my other collaborators at the International Neuroimaging Consortium for generating this data so I could create these flat maps of the Earth.