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Geography

Geography (from Ancient Greek γεωγραφία geōgraphía; combining 'Earth' and gráphō 'write') is the study of the lands, features, inhabitants, and phenomena of Earth.[1] Geography is an all-encompassing discipline that seeks an understanding of Earth and its human and natural complexities—not merely where objects are, but also how they have changed and come to be. While geography is specific to Earth, many concepts can be applied more broadly to other celestial bodies in the field of planetary science.[2] Geography has been called "a bridge between natural science and social science disciplines."[3]

For other uses, see Geography (disambiguation) and Geo (disambiguation).

Origins of many of the concepts in geography can be traced to Greek Eratosthenes of Cyrene, who may have coined the term "geographia" (c. 276 BC – c. 195/194 BC).[4] The first recorded use of the word γεωγραφία was as the title of a book by Greek scholar Claudius Ptolemy (100 – 170 AD).[1] This work created the so-called "Ptolemaic tradition" of geography, which included "Ptolemaic cartographic theory."[5] However, the concepts of geography (such as cartography) date back to the earliest attempts to understand the world spatially, with the earliest example of an attempted world map dating to the 9th century BCE in ancient Babylon.[6] The history of geography as a discipline spans cultures and millennia, being independently developed by multiple groups, and cross-pollinated by trade between these groups. The core concepts of geography consistent between all approaches are a focus on space, place, time, and scale.[7][8][9][10][11][12]


Today, geography is an extremely broad discipline with multiple approaches and modalities. There have been multiple attempts to organize the discipline, including the four traditions of geography, and into branches.[13][3][14] Techniques employed can generally be broken down into quantitative[15] and qualitative[16] approaches, with many studies taking mixed-methods approaches.[17] Common techniques include cartography, remote sensing, interviews, and surveying.

: "Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant."[36][50][51]

Tobler's first law of geography

: "The phenomenon external to a geographic area of interest affects what goes on inside."[50][52]

Tobler's second law of geography

: "Everything is related to everything else, but things observed at a coarse spatial resolution are more related than things observed at a finer resolution."[45][50][46][53][54]

Arbia's law of geography

: Geographic variables exhibit uncontrolled variance.[51][55][56]

Spatial heterogeneity

The uncertainty principle: "That the geographic world is infinitely complex and that any representation must therefore contain elements of uncertainty, that many definitions used in acquiring geographic data contain elements of vagueness, and that it is impossible to measure location on the Earth's surface exactly."

[51]

Physical geography can be divided into many broad categories, including:

Analytical – Asks why we find features and populations in a specific geographic area.

Descriptive – Simply specifies the locations of features and populations.

Regional – Examines systematic relationships between categories for a specific region or location on the planet.

Systematic – Groups geographical knowledge into categories that can be explored globally.

(1769–1859) – published Cosmos and founder of the sub-field biogeography.

Alexander von Humboldt

(Born 1957) – influential in the use of GIS and geographic methods in History.

Anne Kelly Knowles

(1622–1650)– German geographer and author of Geographia Generalis

Bernhardus Varenius

(1889–1975) – cultural geographer.

Carl O. Sauer

(1779–1859) – occupied the first chair of geography at Berlin University.

Carl Ritter

 – cartographic theorist that created the web application ColorBrewer.

Cynthia Brewer

 – originator of map algebra

Dana Tomlin

(1944–2016) – scholar in the space and places of globalization and its pluralities; winner of the Vautrin Lud Prize.

Doreen Massey

(1863–1932) – first female president of the Association of American Geographers.

Ellen Churchill Semple

(c. 276–c. 195/194 BC) – calculated the size of the Earth.

Eratosthenes

(1886–1966) – creator of the concentric zone model.

Ernest Burgess

(1916–1996) – influential in computer cartography and thematic mapping

George F. Jenks

(1512–1594) – cartographer who produced the mercator projection

Gerardus Mercator

(born 1943) – cartographic theorist who wrote numerous books contributing to Geographic Information Systems.

Mark Monmonier

(born 1962) – contributed significantly to the use of GPS and real-time mapping within GIS

Mei-Po Kwan

(born 1944) – GIScience scholar and winner of the RGS founder's medal in 2003.

Michael Frank Goodchild

(Arabic: أبو عبد الله محمد الإدريسي; Latin: Dreses) (1100–1165) – author of Nuzhatul Mushtaq.

Muhammad al-Idrisi

(born 1949) – originator of non-representational theory.

Nigel Thrift

(1845–1918) – founder of the French school of geopolitics, wrote the principles of human geography.

Paul Vidal de La Blache

(c. 100–c. 170) – compiled Greek and Roman knowledge into the book Geographia.

Ptolemy

(1933 – 2014) – the primary originator of modern geographic information systems.

Roger Tomlinson

Sir (1861–1947) – co-founder of the LSE, Geographical Association.

Halford Mackinder

(64/63 BC – c. AD 24) – wrote Geographica, one of the first books outlining the study of geography.

Strabo

(1930–2018) – coined the first law of geography and second law of geography.

Waldo Tobler

(1893–1969) – human geographer and inventor of Central place theory.

Walter Christaller

(1850–1934) – father of American geography and developer of the cycle of erosion.

William Morris Davis

(1930–2022) – Chinese-American scholar credited with starting Humanistic Geography as a discipline.

Yi-Fu Tuan

(AAG)[119]

American Association of Geographers

(US) [120]

American Geographical Society

(Slovenia)

Anton Melik Geographical Institute

(international)

Gamma Theta Upsilon

(Pakistan)

Institute of Geographical Information Systems

(International)

International Geographical Union

(United States)

National Council for Geographic Education

(United States) [121]

National Geographic Society

(Canada)

Royal Canadian Geographical Society

(Denmark)

Royal Danish Geographical Society

(UK) [122]

Royal Geographical Society

(Russia)

Russian Geographical Society

Annals of the American Association of Geographers

Antipode

Applied Geography

Concepts and Techniques in Modern Geography

Dialogues in Human Geography

Economic Geography

Geographia Technica

Geographical Review

Geographical Bulletin

GeoHumanities

International Journal of Geographical Information Science

ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information

Journal of Maps

Journal of Rural Studies

Journal of Transport Geography

National Geographic

Professional Geographer

Progress in Human Geography

The Geographical Journal

The Professional Geographer

at the Encyclopaedia Britannica website

Geography

Definition of geography at Dictionary.com

Definition of geography by Lexico

Origin and meaning of geography by Online Etymology Dictionary

Topic Dictionaries at Oxford Learner's Dictionaries