The Spirit Of Quantitative Geography

摘要

All of us taking part in the "Legends" session must be nearer the end of our academic lives than the beginning and it's a very rare privilege to have this opportunity for reflecting together. Thank you very much. Any occasion like this prompts thoughts in three time frames-past, present, and future-and I've arranged my notes accordingly. My apologies to Charles Dicken's A Christmas Carol (1843) for the titles. Of course, I don't mean "spirit" in the literal ghostly sense although I hope that figures such as Torsten Hagerstrand, Peter Gould, and Dick Chorley might be keeping a friendly and correcting eye on our proceedings. After all, history is "just a fable agreed upon" and they played a key role in the quantitative geography fable. But a meeting such as this does inevitably prompt backward glances. I've tried to convey in my own paper about quantitative geography at Cambridge in the 1950s and 1960s (which Barry Boots is kindly giving for me) some sense of how much fun it was (most of the time). "Bliss was it in that dawn ... etc. etc." Of course, there were down moments as when Chorley and I found we had made an error in computing some of Bill Krumbein's trend surfaces and faced yet another 3 days on the Marchant hand-cranked adding machines. We were both far too junior to be allowed access to the Cambridge EDSAC computer.