Isometric Systems in Isotropic Space

April 17, 2017 10:36 AM

Agnes Denes' Isometric Systems in Isotropic Space-Map Projections is a series of drawings of world maps projected onto non-spherical shapes: pyramid, torus, cube, snail, and so on. Collected in the (very out of print) Map Projections, which you can browse here (or with zooming via a flash version).
posted by cortex (12 comments total)

I'd love to see a cube projection aligned to Google's S2 cells.
posted by radwolf76 at 10:47 AM on April 17, 2017 [1 favorite]

UMBER, showing off his new world shaped like a cube: I call it Cuba.
ELIOT: That’s already a place.
UMBER: Is it?
ELIOT: Yes.
UMBER: You’re sure?
ELIOT: Absolutely sure.
UMBER: Oh. Damn it.

posted by leotrotsky at 11:04 AM on April 17, 2017 [1 favorite]

Topologists unimpressed by everything but the torus.
posted by leotrotsky at 11:13 AM on April 17, 2017 [1 favorite]

You've been on a super run of posts lately, cortex! Nice stuff.
posted by Wolfdog at 11:16 AM on April 17, 2017

Also: Differential topologists quite impressed by cube and pyramid.
posted by Wolfdog at 11:55 AM on April 17, 2017

Toroidal planets previously.
posted by ambrosen at 12:25 PM on April 17, 2017 [2 favorites]

Verrry nice. I worked on a project with NatGeo a few years ago that used an S2-like gnomonic + cube face projection to get their print maps into an interactive spinny globe; It was a very fun geometric exercise. Most projections fall apart disastrously at certain global extremes. For example, the North and South poles are unrepresentable in Spherical Web Mercator. Using the faces of an earth cube as four separate projections (as S2 does, and we did) makes it possible to minimize those places.
posted by migurski at 12:25 PM on April 17, 2017 [1 favorite]

Yes.
posted by Kabanos at 12:41 PM on April 17, 2017

So those holes at the poles aren't the secret entrances to the hollow Earth, but just the hole through the toroidal Earth. That makes much more sense.
posted by ckape at 1:11 PM on April 17, 2017

Eeeeeeeee! One of my very prizest possessions is a large silver-on-blue print of these I got from Agnes around '86! Wonderful to see her work turn up here.
posted by adamgreenfield at 1:22 PM on April 17, 2017 [3 favorites]

(Though some of her work from that era and the one just before, particularly The Wheatfield, is now unbearably sad to contemplate, Agnes continues to inspire my thought to this day.)
posted by adamgreenfield at 1:26 PM on April 17, 2017

Much more inventive than the USGS's Map projections: A working manual, too.
posted by scruss at 1:28 PM on April 17, 2017