Category: Cartography

The list below is believed complete, though membership — like everything here — is subject to revision.

• 180-degree plane — Claim that the equator is a 90-radian circle forming one flat plane that contains all land.
• Anaximander — The Milesian who first set the Earth adrift, unsupported at the centre of things — and left it, all the same, flat on top.
• Babylonian Map of the World — The oldest known map of the whole world — a clay disc ringed by a "Bitter River", and so also the oldest flat-earth map.
• Eratosthenes — Greek polymath (c. 276–194 BC) who measured the Earth's circumference to within a few percent — the figure whole-radian geometry declines to address.
• The figure of the Earth — The measured shape of the planet, and the long labour of measuring it.
• Flat Earth — The cosmographies that decline the curvature of the Earth — the umbrella under which the encyclopedia's several flat doctrines are gathered.
• Ptolemy — Alexandrian astronomer (c. 100–170 AD) whose Earth-centred cosmos held for 1,400 years — its central Earth, to his admirers' inconvenience, a sphere.
• The Schiehallion experiment — The 1774 measurement that weighed the Earth by how far a Scottish mountain pulled a plumb-line sideways — and invented the contour map doing it.
• Whole-radian geometry — Discredited system in which a circle holds 360 radians, a radian is a distance, and a turn is 4π.

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