You can always make good local maps of a sphere. I think that's just a basic property of Riemannian manifolds: they locally look like flat space. The problem t

You can always make good local maps of a sphere. I think that's just a basic property of Riemannian manifolds: they locally look like flat space. The problem that this paper is trying to solve, however, is the creation of a minimally distorted (according to some penalty function) global map.