This is a guest post by Ernie Davis Professor of Computer Science at NYU. Ernie has a BS in Math from MIT (1977) and a PhD in Computer Science from Yale (1984). He does research in artificial intelligence, knowledge representation, and automated commonsense reasoning. He and his father, Philip Davis, are editors of Mathematics, Substance and Surmise: Views on the Ontology and Meaning of Mathematics, published by Springer.

Any government which genuinely cared about education would see to it that a globe map, at present an expensive rarity, was accessible to every school child.
— George Orwell, “As I Please” February 11, 1944

The decision by the Boston school system to replace maps of the world using the Mercator projection with maps using the Gall-Peters projection has garnered a lot of favorable press from outlets such as NPR, The Guardian, Newsweek, and many others.

Mercator map of the world.

Gall-Peters…