Valeriepieris circle: History and Key Facts

A Valeriepieris circle ( VAL-ə-ree-PY-rəs) is a figure drawn on the Earth's surface such that the majority of the human population lives within its interior. The concept was originally popularized by a map posted on Reddit in 2013, made by an American ESL teacher named Ken Myers, whose username on the site gave the figure its name. Myers's original circle covers only about 10% of the Earth's total surface area, with a radius of around 4,000 kilometers (2,500 miles), centered in the South China Sea and covers more than half of Asia, including some of the world's most populous countries. The map became a popular meme, and was featured in numerous internet media outlets.

Myers's original map uses the Winkel tripel projection, which means that his circle, not having been adjusted to the projection, does not correspond to a circle on the surface of a sphere.

In 2015, Singaporean professor Danny Quah verified Myers's original claim, as well as presenting a new, considerably smaller circle centered on the township of Mong Khet in Myanmar, with a radius of 3,300 kilometers (2,050 mi). In fact, Quah claimed this circle to be the smallest one possible, having been produced from more rigorous calculations and updated data, as well as being a proper circle on the Earth's surface.

In 2022, Myers's original circle was again tested by Riaz Shah, a professor at Hult International Business School. Shah used recently published data from the United Nations' World Population Prospects to estimate that 4.2 billion people lived inside the circle as of 2022, out of a total human population of 8 billion. Mapmaker Alasdair Rae proposed The Yuxi Circle, after reviewing 1,500 circles (148 of which had 4 billion or more inhabitants), claiming that the city of Yuxi in Yunnan province, China has the largest population living within a 4,000 km radius: 4.32 billion (55% of the world population at the time).

Source and attribution

Text excerpted from Valeriepieris circle by Wikipedia contributors, available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0. The extract is abridged and formatting has been adjusted; the adapted text on this page is shared under the same licence. Revision history.