>The Peters Projection World Map is one of the most stimulating, and controversial, images of the world. When this map was first introduced by historian and cartographer Dr. Arno Peters at a Press Conference in Germany in 1974 it generated a firestorm of debate.
I get the impression that calling it Peters instead of Gall-Peters is a good sign that the speaker is a Peters-evangelist, rather than someone who actually cares about cartography.
I'm not sure any of this is really accurate. Go read the wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall%E2%80%93Peters_projection#...
tl;dr:
-Peters wasn't novel. An identical projection was created a century earlier (that's why it's called Gall-Peters).
-Peters made completely BS claims about his projection.
-Cartographers had already been using plenty of projections beyond Mercator for a long time and they knew very well that it had problems.
By the way, I'm pretty sure the xkcd about projections has a punchline and hover text that is directly related to the information above.