Famous Geographers.docx

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Famous GeographersPaul Vidal de la Blache (Father of French human geography) -- introduced the contemporary

culture landscape, sometimes called the regional studies approach; Among the connections thattie people to a certain environment, one of the most tenacious is food supply; clothing and

weapons are more subject to modification than the dietary regime, which experience has shown

to be best suited to human needs in a given climate.

He conceived the idea of genre de vie, which isthe belief that the lifestyle of particular region reflects the economic,social, ideological and psychologicalidentities imprinted on the landscape. Vidal has been linked to the term "possibilism", which he neverused but which summed up conveniently his opposition to thedeterminismof the sort

Ibn Batuda (arab)- also known as Shams ad Din,best known as an extensive traveler or

explorer, whose account documents his travels and side-excursions over a period of almost thirtyyears, covering some 73,000 miles (117,000 km). This journeying covered almost the entirety ofthe known Islamic world, extending also to present-day India, the Maldives, Sri Lanka,

Southeast Asia and China, a distance readily surpassing that of his prior, near-contemporary and

traveler Marco Polo. He wrote about the many different places he had traveled to in hisbookRehla(Travels). In the book he notes the different climates, peoples, and customs.

Arabs geographersAmong the earliest Muslim geographers were al-Khwarizmi, the

mathematician, who participated in a project to draw a map of the known earth in the early 9th century

CE. Al-Kindi, the philosopher, wrote an account of the inhabited parts of earth as known then. Some of

the greatest traveler-geographers were Ibn Hawqal, who traveled for over 30 years and wrote about

the places and people he saw, and the famous al-Masudi. He traveled, quoted geographic works that

have disappeared, and wrote his own encyclopedia of geography and history called Meadows of Gold

and Mines of Precious Stones in 956 CE. The Palestinian al-Maqdisi described the different climate

zones, languages, towns, traded commodities, soils, and topography during the mid-10 century.Many

of these writers noted that the earth was round. Caliph al-Mamun sent a team headed by al-

Faraghani to measure a degree of longitude in order to check the Greeks calculations and

measure the circumference of the earth. Al-Biruni (972-1050 CE) wrote kitab al-hind-TheBook of India, in which he described the sciences of Indian civilization, the topography of the

sub-continent, and even made many geological observations, such as noticing that an ancient seamust have covered the Indus Valley at one time. He studied the seas, and believed there was a

passageway through the southern oceans, and related the tides to the phases of the moon. Al-

Biruni was mathematical geographer who accurately plotted the Indian coastline by calculating

the longitude and latitude coordinates of cities and ports.According to Arabs, the western limitof the habitable world was at the end of the Mediterranean Sea, the eastern at Sila (Japan), the

northern in the land of Yajuj Majuj (Siberia) and the southern to the south of equator.Infact, the

word monsoon has been derived from the Arabic word mausam which means season. Al-

Masudi, during his journey to India gave a detailed description of the Indian monsoons. Many

local winds of Egypt, Arab, Algeria and Libya have also been described by the Arabgeographers. In 985, Al-Maqdisi divided the world into fourteen climatic regions. He also

presented the idea that the Southern Hemisphere is mostly an open ocean and most of the worlds

land area is in the northern hemisphere.Ibn-Khaldunwrote the monumental work Muqaddamaa

description of human society in six parts, viz. (1) Civilisation, geography and anthropology;(2)

Nomadic culture, comparison with sedentary culture, sociology and historical causes and

consequences of the conflicts between two cultures;(3) Dynasties, kingdom etc.,;(4) Life invillages and cities, how cities should be organized;(5) Professions and means of livelihood;(6)
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Classification of sciences.Ibn-Sina also keenly observed the work of the agents of denudation

and weathering in the mountains and held that the mountain streams erode the slopes. He also

noted the presence of fossils in the rocks in high mountains. The Arabs borrowed from theGreeks the division of the globe of the earth into five zones. The Torrid Zone, two frigid zones

and two temperate zones.

Edrisi (Idrisi) -Arab geographer, a descendant of the Prophet Mohammed, who in the 1100scollected all known geographical information and assembled at the time the most accuraterepresentation of the world. His inhabited earth is divided into seven climates. al-Idrisi, whostudied at Crdoba. He traveled far and wide, and collected information for Roger II, Norman king ofSicily, who supported publication of a set of maps and information called the Book of Roger. Theinformation contained in the Book of Rogerwas also engraved on a silver planisphere, a disc-shaped mapthat was one of the wonders of the age. Although al-Idrisi is famous for the round map of the worldshown at right, he made over 70 maps that charted territories never before put onto a map. The landsaround the Mediterranean are so accurately shaped that parts of them can be compared with satelliteimages. Idrisi had compiled a new geography book that corrected many discrepancies. Idrisi correctedthe idea that the Indian Ocean was enclosed and that the Caspian Sea was a gulf to the world ocean.

Ernest W. Burgess- a sociologist at the University of Chicago, developed the concentric-zonemodel in 1925 with five zones; a city grows outward from a central area in a series of concentric

rings, like the growth rings of a tree.

Walter Christaller -German geographer who in the early 1930s first formulated central-placetheory as a series of models designed to explain the spatial distribution of urban centers. Crucial

to his theory is the fact that different goods and services vary both in threshold and in range.

William Morris Davis- an American geographer, geologist and meteorologist, often called the

"father of American geography". His most influential scientific contribution was the cycle of

erosion, first defined around 1884, which was a model of how rivers create landforms. Thoughthe cycle is considered overly simplistic today, it was a crucial early contribution togeomorphology. It suggests that (larger) rivers have three main sections: upper course, middle

course, and lower course- each of which has distinct landforms and other properties associated

with it.

Eratosthenes -coined the name geography: geo meaning the earth and graphein meaning towrite. He is noted for devising a system of latitude and longitude, and for being the first known

to have calculated the size of the Earth within a remarkable 0.5 percent accuracy. He prepared

one of the earliest maps of the known world.

Herodatus - He is almost exclusively known for writing The Histories, a collection of 'inquiries'

about the different places and peoples he encountered during his wide ranging travels around theMediterranean littoral and into Mesopotamia. He took as the unifying theme for this work the

conflict between the ancient Greeks and the Persians or 'Medes'.


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Richard Hartshorne - a prominent American geographer. He is the author of The Nature of

Geography (1939) and Perspective on the Nature of Geography (1959)

Homer Hoyt - an economist who studied housing data for 142 American cities, presented his

sector model of urban land use in 1939. he maintained that high-rent residential districts wereinstrumental in shaping the land-use structure of the city. Because these areas were reinforced bytransportation routes, the pattern of their development was one of sectors or wedges, not

concentric zones.

Alexander von Humboldt - he is considered one of the founders of modern geography work on

botanical geography was foundational to the field of biogeography; set about the task of

collecting and analyzing data about the relationships between the spatial distribution of rocks,plants, and animals.

Ellsworth Huntington - one of the best known U.S. proponents of Ratzels ideas; argued that

climate was a major determinant of civilization; according to him climate of maritime

northwestern Europe produced greater human efficiency as measured by better health conditions,

lower death rates, and higher standards of living.

Immanuel Kant - writing in the latter part of the eighteenth century, distinguished betweenspecific fields of knowledge represented by disciplines such as physics and biology, and the two

general fields of knowledge: geography, which classified things according to space, and history

which classified things according to time; influential philosopher, and his belief in the

intellectual importance of geography was an important element in establishing the subject as aformal discipline.

Halford John Mackinder - proposed the heartland theory in the early twentieth century based on

environmental determinism, the heartland theory addresses the balance of power in the world

and, in particular, the possibility of world conquest based on natural habitat advantage. It heldthat the Eurasian continent was the most likely base from which to launch a successful campaign

for world conquest.

Thomas Robert Malthus - English economist and cleric was the most famous pioneer observer of

population growth with the publishing in 1798 of An Essay on the Principle of Population,

known as the dismal essay. He believed that the human ability to multiply far exceeds our

ability to increase food production. He maintained that a strong and constantly operating checkon population will necessarily act as a natural control on numbers. He regarded famine, disease,

and war as the inevitable outcome of the human populations outstripping the food supply.


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George Perkins Marsh - in 1864 he wrote a treatise entitled Man and Nature, or Physical

Geography as Modified by Human Action. As the first work to suggest that human beings are

significant agents of environmental change, it is considered one of the most important advancesin geography, ecology, and resource management in the nineteenth century; major influence on

U.S. environmentalism.

W.D. Pattison - wrote The Four Traditions of Geography: Earth science tradition, human-

environment tradition, regional / landscape, and spatial tradition.

Ptolemy - main work is his Geographia. This too is a compilation of what was known about the

world's geography in the Roman Empire during his time; devised and provided instructions on

how to create maps both of the whole inhabited world and of the Roman provinces.

Friedrich Ratzel - a German trained in Biology and Chemistry who originated geopolitical theoryin the late 1800s; greatly influenced by the theories of social Darwinism. He stated seven laws

of state growth; the model portrays the state as behaving like a biological organism; thus, its

growth and change are seen as natural and inevitable; pioneered the belief of environmental

determinism.

Carl Ritter - he is considered one of the founders of modern geography; In his view, "geographywas a kind of physiology and comparative anatomy of the earth: rivers, mountains, glaciers, &c.,

were so many distinct organs, each with its own appropriate functions; and, as his physical frame

is the basis of the man, determinative to a large extent of his life, so the structure of each country

is a leading element in the historic progress of the nation;" His 20-volumne Erdkunde was amonumental work of comparison and classification; He and von Humboldt urged human

geographers to adopt the methods of scientific inquiry used by natural scientists.

W. W. Rostow - in 1960 proposed a widely cited model for economic advancement.

Generalizing on the sweep of modern history, he theorized that all developing economies maypass through five successive stages of growth and advancement.

Carl Sauer - conducted pioneering research on the origins and dispersal of plant and animaldomestication, was one of the first t propose that the process of domestication was independently

invented at many different times and locations. He believed that domestication did not develop in

response to hunger. He maintained that necessity was not the mother of agricultural invention,

because starving people must spend every waking hour searching for food and have no time todevote to the centuries of leisurely experimentation required to domesticate plants.

Ellen Churchill Semple - suggested in 1911 that such desert-dwelling peoples receive from the


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immense monotony of their environment the impression of unity. She proposed that the

unobstructed view of the stars and planets provided by the clear desert skies allowed the herders

to see that the heavenly bodies moved across the sky in an orderly, repeated progression.

Concluded that desert dwellers gravitate inevitably into monotheism; carried Ratzels ideas tothe United States; claimed that geography was the study of the influences of the natural

environment of people.

Strabo - mostly remembered for his 17-volume work Geographica, which literally means

"Geography". It presented a descriptive history of people and places from different regions of theknown world for his era.

Johann Heinrich von Thunen - German scholar-farmer who developed the core-periphery modelin the nineteenth century (economic determinism). In his model he proposed an isolated state

that had no trade connections with the outside world; possessed only one market, located

centrally in the state; and had uniform soil, climate, and level terrain throughout. He created thismodel to study the influence of distance from market and the concurrent transport costs on the

type and intensity of agriculture.

Waldo R. Tobler - an influential American-Swiss geographer and cartographer. His idea that

"Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related to each other" is

referred to as the "first law of geography," summarized this law in the concept of distance decay.

Alfred Weber - German geographer who was a major theorists of industrial location. He devised

a model of how to understand industrial locations in regard to several factors, including laborsupply, markets, resource location, and transpiration.
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