Peter Barber, the Head of Map Collections at the British Library, presents a listing of the ten map that changed the world. While almost all of the maps have had an impact, most of my long-time readers know that I'm certainly not a fan of the Peters' Projection. I don't think it has had much of an impact, beyond an appearance on The West Wing.
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Matt,
For years I have displayed a large Peters Projection (the English version by Oxford Cartographers Ltd.) on a classroom wall. I find its properties and distortions useful in the geography class to illustrate the general properties of world map projections. It can readily be seen, of course, that the map property of shape is terribly distorted. But it is useful in comparing true sizes of land masses.
On an adjacent wall I have a large Mercator projection, with its distortions of the size of land masses toward the poles, which I compare to Peters and to the National Geographic Society’s Winkel-Tripel compromise projection.
One does not have to be a “fan” of any projection to find them useful, especially when comparing to other projections with differing attributes. The very drawbacks of the Peters become useful for didactic purposes, especially to point out that all projections are distortions in at least one of the four map properties–size, shape, distance, and direction. Finally, if for no other purpose, students want to know why the Peters looks so “wrong.” That becomes a teachable moment.