Maybe you're not following. First, forget about equations and formulas. That's what I did. So, how do you map a strip to a segment? In terms of visualisation:
You can think of the strip as a set of parallel lines. And the segment is a set of rays. So, I thought of mapping each line to a ray.
So, first, how can you map a single line to a ray? One problem, of course, is that the line goes to infinity in two directions, where the ray goes to zero in one direction and infinity in the other.
The solution was to map the middle of the line (x = 0) to a point 1 unit along the ray (r = 1). Then map one half of the line (x > 0) to the infinite bit of the ray (r > 1); and map the -ve half of the line (x < 0) to the ray r < 1.
Can you visualise that?
One good way to achieve this is using the real exp function (hence the hint in your question), since exp maps (-∞, ∞) to (0, ∞).
The next step was think how to map every line in the strip to a different ray.
I thought: map one boundary line to one boundary ray, then proportionally map every line to a ray. Working your way across the strip from t to 0, while working your way across the segment from -π/6 to π/3. (Although in the mapping we want, we're only mapping the interior, not the boundaries as well.)
At this point, I guess, algebra has to come in and we have to start writing down formulas.
So, leaving the formula out for now, can you visualise this?