Nicolosi Globular Projection

The Nicolosi globular projection is a polyconic map projection that displays one hemisphere of the Earth at a time within a circular outline meant to resemble a globe, and it is a compromise projection that balances several kinds of distortion rather than eliminating any one of them entirely. The Persian scholar Al Biruni devised the first recorded globular projection, for celestial maps, around the year 1000, and the Sicilian chaplain Giovanni Battista Nicolosi independently reinvented essentially the same projection in Rome in 1660 while adapting an earlier design by Georges Fournier. The projection became prominent in Western cartography from 1660 onward and reached its greatest popularity in the nineteenth century, when it was often used to produce double hemisphere world maps, before falling out of common use by the early twentieth century, when it became rare.