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The Gall–Peters projection, named after James Gall and Arno Peters, is one specialization of a configurable equal-area map projection known as the equal-area cylindric or cylindrical equal-area projection. It achieved considerable notoriety in the late 20th century as the centerpiece of a controversy about the political implications of map design. Maps based on the projection are promoted by UNESCO, and they are also widely used by British schools.

The Mercator projection is a cylindrical map projection presented by the Flemish geographer and cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569. It became the standard map projection for nautical purposes because of its ability to represent lines of constant course, known as rhumb lines or loxodromes, as straight segments that conserve the angles with the meridians. Although the linear scale is equal in all directions around any point, thus preserving the angles and the shapes of small objects (which makes the projection conformal), the Mercator projection distorts the size of objects as the latitude increases from the Equator to the poles, where the scale becomes infinite. So, for example, landmasses such as Greenland and Antarctica appear much larger than they actually are relative to land masses near the equator, such as Central Africa.