Did you know?
Many ancient cultures thought that the Earth was flat and that if you sailed far enough you would fall off the edge! Of course we now know the Earth is in fact a globe and if you sail far enough (while avoiding land) you can come back to where you started. Pythagoras is credited to be the first to propose a spherical Earth in the 6th Century BC.
Check out the following nets for what the ancients may have believed were representations of the world. If you fold them up to form a 3D shape we'll get a little closer to a representation of the globe.
taken from http://www.newscientist.com/gallery/unfolding-the-earth/2
Cartography (the study of maps) is a really interesting field. There is a lot of mathematics in maps from the longitude, latitude lines, time lines, coordinate systems and the map projection itself.
Questions
- Which of the shapes above is most like the globe you are most familiar with?
- Why is that?