Since the nineteenth century, American geographers have applied mathematical concepts to geographic research, and they have increased the level of mathematical sophistication associated with their research. To some extent geographers have traditionally been interested in developing methods of quantitative geographic analysis; however, it was not until the turn of the twentieth century that there was concentrated effort to develop special programs of quantitative methods training and to expand the scope of quantitative geographic research. This paper attempts to examine certain aspects of expansion of quantitative methods training and research for the period 1954-1965. Since the early 1950s the number of major geography departments offering specialized training in quantitative methodology has risen from three percent to over seventy-eight percent. Today many departments require training in statistics and mathematics and roughly one third of the major American doctoral training centers now allow their students to substitute mathematics training for one foreign language requirement. This trend is paralleled by an increasingly large number of quantitative dissertations and quantitative research papers found in a sample of the major geographic journals. Our studies indicate that these trends originated at the University of Washington, and certain Midwestern universities, but after a short period of time, the quantitative revolution spread throughout American geographic centers.LMOST from the beginning, geographers
It is probable that spatial variability of topographic slope is best explained by some measure of the vertical topographic dimension in areas where insufficient time has elapsed since deposition of materials for slopes to attain time independence. A statistical analysis of some spatial relationships of mean topographic slope beyond that with local relief was conducted on erosional terrain in the glaciated Upper Mississippi Valley. Although all variables are statistically significant, the results indicate that factors other than relief, including nature of long stream profile, position, orientation, degree of dissection, and parent materials, have less relevance in explaining place-to-place variation of topographic slope.HIS paper relates formulation of a multi-T variate statistical model accounting for spatial variability of mean topographic slope and application of the model in an area containing stream-dissected glacial materials2 The purpose of the analysis is to assess the relevance of a reasonably comprehensive set of variables and attributes elicited from the
EOGRAPHERS and other social scientists have become increasingly aware of the necessity of parsimonious abstraction of variates from the whole mix of factors associated with various aspects of human behavior and employing such purportedly relevant variates in naive, or simplifying quantitative models that describe logically lawful relationships between human behavior and other phenomena.Gravity and potential, or spatial interactance models consider only the spatial aspect of human behavior; the propensity of masses of population to travel and interact in two-dimensional space.After brief discussion of the theory of spatial interactance models, an original application follows for statistical solution of a migration problem relating to the geography of education.
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