Fuller and the Dymaxion map.
Seventy-five years ago today, the pages of Life Magazine, March 1, 1943, included a craft project, in the form of a Dymaxion map of the world. A flat map of the round earth is always distorted, in either scale, direction, or shape. For example, the familiar Mercator projection accurately shows direction, but scale is greatly distorted close to the poles, which explains why Greenland looks much larger than it really is.
The Dymaxion map, designed by R. Buckmisnter Fuller, seeks to compromise to make all of these distortions as minimal as possible. It is a cube with the corners cut off, and is formed from six squares and eight triangles. The transformation from a round globe to a flat map is shown in the animation at right.
The magazine contained all of these sections, some of which are shown above, with instructions for pasting them to cardboard and assembling them. When assembled, they could be laid out flat in various configurations, or put together completely as a squared-off globe. For those wishing to duplicate the 1943 globe, it would be an easy process to print the pages on cardstock and assemble them following the directions. (You can download the magazine at this link,)
An interesting science fair project could be made comparing a globe, a Mercator projection, and the Dymaxion projection.