We wanted to graph a structure that represented the number of languages different countries around the world spoke. To do this, we first chose various countries from every continent in order to get an accurate sample and figured out how many languages each country spoke. We found our data from an online archive that tracks the number of languages spoken in each country1. We got our coordinates by choosing latitude and longitude points from each country. The X and Y axis represent longitude and latitude respectively, and the Z axis represents how many languages are spoken by each country. We then projected a map of the world onto this graph to try and make it easier to read and identify specific countries.
We decided that this model was not displaying our data in an accessible manner so we wanted to project the data onto a globe instead. To do this, we converted the latitude, longitude, and number of languages spoken to phi, theta, and rho coordinates.We then converted those points from spherical coordinates to cartesian coordinates so that we could graph our data as a globe in Mathematica. Once we converted all of our data to cartesian coordinates, we made a globe with a radius of 1. Since the radius was so small, we needed to scale down the data that represented the umbrellas of languages so that they could be viewed at the same time as the globe.We then used Mathematica commands like “PlotStyle,” “ListPointPlot3D,” and “Show” to graph the coordinates onto an actual 3D globe. The “PlotStyle” command enabled us to translate an image of the world map onto the surface, “ListPointPlot3D” created a box with all our data points, and “Show” put the box with the points and the 3D globe together to project our final image.
