Waldo Tobler

Waldo Tobler, from his web site Waldo Tobler, according to his Wikipedia entry, coined the first law of geography in 1970: “Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things.” Now a retired geography professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Tobler has a home page that reprints a large number of publications and presentations. many of which appear to focus on the mathematics of cartography, and as such are totally opaque to me.

Posted on Sunday, August 19, 2007 at 8:49 PM
Categories: Cartography

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I’ve long been interested in the work of Waldo Tobler and have had the pleasure of meeting him on several occasions in Santa Barbara. I first came across his work in grad school (and even did a project on him!). His work on projections is ground breaking—and you’re right, he and Bill Bunge (author of Theoretical Geography in 1966) did the most to explore that field.

While Waldo coined the term First Law of Geography he did not of course invent it (it’s basically the classic gravity model or the long tail, etc. etc.) nor would he claim to have invented it. There’s a nice appreciation of the impact of this work in the Annals from 2004 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.2004.09402005.x).

(By the way I nearly didn’t leave this comment because of the fact that you are required to sign up for an account here. That’s just what I need: another account!)

[TypeKey Profile Page] ubikcan | 08/20/2007 at 8:35 AM | #

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