Please tell me…

[Atarimaster]

… since nowadays, there are still people who start using Gall-Peters because it’s equal area and think that’s great just because Mercator isn’t…

Is it really true that in the USA, Mercator is still widely used as a schoolroom map and in atlases?
I find that very hard to believe.

Regards,
Tobias

[daan]

This is what’s known as a “straw man”. No, Mercator is not ubiquitous. You can find commercial wall maps using the projection, but you can find lots more that don’t use it. You cannot find Mercator in many modern atlases, and in the few you can find it in, it does not feature prominently, but instead is used for time zones or even to demonstrate its unsuitability for general reference.

I’m not sure about school wall maps; lots of choices are available, but I don’t know of any research showing just what gets bought and installed into classrooms. The American school system is highly decentralized, so decisions about this are made at the district level or even by individual teachers. My own experience as a student was that Mercator was one of several projections I’d see on wall maps. In the decades since, most of the Mercator maps have been retired, usually replaced by Robinson, but with plenty of Miller cylindric, Eckert IV, Gall—Peters, Winkel tripel—you name it.

Best,
— daan

[Atarimaster]

This is what’s known as a “straw man”.

A suitable term.
No matter if they’re called Peters or Narukawa, they always come up with that »we’ve been fooled for more than 400 years« story.
I don’t know about wall maps of the 1960ies – apparently, it was the wall map in Mr. Peters’ office that initiated his work – but in atlases of that time and the decades before that Mercator definitely wasn’t ubiquitous. (At least, this holds true for german atlases, I can’t say for other ones.)

But what bugs is most is that journalists keep repeating those false assertions without even bothering to run a web search for five minutes…

Thanks for your reply,
kind regards,
Tobias

[Piotr]

In my school, world maps use Winkel Tripel, Robinson or Mollweide projection. The other projections I've seen used is some recentered projection for maps of certain places, some cylindrical projection between equirectangular and Mercator for time zone map and Mercator projection for an exercise to get latitude and longitude numbers from points on map.