{"id":5656,"date":"2018-11-03T08:00:27","date_gmt":"2018-11-03T08:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.viewsoftheworld.net\/?p=5656"},"modified":"2020-01-15T17:09:14","modified_gmt":"2020-01-15T17:09:14","slug":"waldo-tobler-remembering-a-genius","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.viewsoftheworld.net\/?p=5656","title":{"rendered":"Remembering Waldo Tobler"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"PoliticalWaldo Tobler is dead. He is most remembered for his a\ufb00able manner, his very kindly smile, the remarkable longevity of this academic life, his great academic achievements and \u2013 much more importantly \u2013 for being very kind, especially to strangers. A generation of scholars who received his collected works on \ufb02oppy disc (later on CD) is evidence for his commitment to engage with other scholars. He made no distinction between the hierarchies in academia and gave young scholars the same respect and attention as senior academics, acting as a mentor and source of inspiration to many of them. Understanding and discovery were his real aspirations.
\nHis most simple of discoveries are most often quoted, \u2018Tobler\u2019s law\u2019 and \u2018Tobler\u2019s walking rule\u2019, but behind such simplistic truisms, there was a mind that was constantly producing ideas that others, including the vast majority of his colleagues, rarely understood at the time. It is lucky he was such a patient man or else he could have become exasperated.
\nOne of Waldo\u2019s earliest papers was entitled \u2018Automation and cartography\u2019 and was published in the Geographical Review (Tobler, 1959). He was at the forefront years before his contemporaries, but his great modesty meant that few initially noticed \u2013 and none resented. Through the 1960s he quietly produced what would become seminal papers, the \ufb01rst on computer animation, on medieval mapping, on the mathematics of mapping and on \ufb01lters and the inverses (in Geographical Analysis) \u2013 touching on what we now know as spatial smoothing and sharpening \u2013 and about the methodology behind everything from optical character reading to, eventually, automated face recognition. He began all this with a wonderful PhD thesis on map transformations (Tobler, 1961). Waldo did modern cartograms \ufb01rst, and the way they are still made today is essentially his method; admittedly with a few very clever tweaks that speed things up considerably and mean that we are on the verge of real-time complex map transformation; when any map morphs in any way you want, as you watch it.
\nWith most inventors, it is possible to say that if they had not done it someone else would have stepped in shortly afterwards and \ufb01lled their boots, or even that someone else was actually inventing the same things at the very same time because it was actually the next obvious step to take. You cannot say that about Tobler. There was no one else at the same time doing anything at all similar and many of his ideas remain to this day to still be taken forward because they are still too innovative for our times. Waldo operated as if he had come from the future. His ideas about the (imaginary still to be visualized economic) winds that move migrants around the USA and the transformation of time to morph it into space have not yet been taken very far forwards. In 1971 he was one of the \ufb01rst, and possibly still the only, human geographer to have a paper published in Nature on archaeology (Tobler and Wineburg, 1971).
\nTobler\u2019s most productive year was 1973. In a paper published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences that year he showed how the districting problem of the USA, and anywhere else in the world, could be solved (Tobler, 1973a). This was done by simply putting a hexagonal grid over an equal population density map and then re-projecting those hexagons back into real space to create a set of districts that fairly de\ufb01ned each of equal population. Imagine if his ideas had been taken up \u2013 no more gerrymandering in US politics! In Geographical Analysis that year he demonstrated completely new forms of mapping (Tobler, 1973b). And in a collected work, he explained how the geometry of our imagined mental maps could be better understood (Tobler, 1973c). And then, for a further \ufb01ve decades he just carried on publishing. Keith Clarke has written about this later period in his obituary of Waldo published in CaGIS (Clarke, 2018).
\nWe have said very little about his family and friends, about where he came from and much about what he was like. It was a beautiful sunny spring afternoon in March 2016 that one of the authors last met Waldo in the modest house a ten-minute drive away from UCSB\u2019s campus where he and his wife Rachel lived. Under the citrus trees in his garden, his mind was sharp as ever, passionately discussing his ongoing appetite for advancing cartogram techniques and going into minute details of the underlying maths. And yet he had a very genuine personal side that he was willing to share with people around him. Speaking about his Swiss roots, his life in the US and his travels leaves a memory of him with a warm smile on that March afternoon. Here, at his home, he was the most modest and down-to-earth person who showed his greatest appreciation of the little things in life, such as the birds buzzing around the citrus trees. His curiosity to engage with the world around him was never-ending. For those who want to know more about the most unusual geographer, Sandy Thoits has written more about his private and personal side in the local Noozhawk newspaper (Thoits, 2018<\/a>).
\nWe have written this note to point out that his genius was well recognized in Europe and hope that the points we make lead to some research students out there \u2013 just starting o\ufb00 \u2013 to go back to those original 1970s papers and draw up the new boundaries of the USA that future elections should be held on, to determine the economic winds that blow migrants into, across and out of the USA \u2013 their strength and direction, and then the change in that human climate over time; and to look into where Waldo only just began to look, at the mapping of time and space brought together.<\/p>\n

References:<\/strong><\/em>
\nClarke, K.C. (2018) \u201cObituary: Waldo R. Tobler (1930\u20132018)<\/a>\u201d Cartography and Geographic Information Science 45 (4) pp.287\u2013288.
\nTobler, W.R. (1959) \u201cAutomation and cartography<\/a>\u201d Geographical Review 49 (4) pp.526\u2013534.
\nTobler, W.R. (1961) \u201cMap transformations of geographic space<\/a>\u201d (PhD thesis) University of Washington.
\nTobler, W.R. (1973a) \u201cA continuous transformation useful for districting<\/a>\u201d Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 219 (1) pp.215\u2013220.
\nTobler, W.R. (1973b) \u201cChoropleth maps without class intervals?<\/a>\u201d Geographical Analysis 5 (3) pp.262\u2013265.
\nTobler, W.R. (1973c) \u201cThe Geometry of Mental Maps<\/a>\u201d In Golledge, R. and Rushton, G. (Eds.) Essays on the Multidimensional Analysis of Perceptions and Preferences Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, pp.69\u201381.
\nTobler, W. and Wineburg, S. (1971) \u201cA Cappadocian speculation<\/a>\u201d Nature 231 pp.39\u201341.
\nThoits, S. (2018) \u201cWaldo R. Tobler of Santa Barbara, 1930\u20132018\u201d Obituaries Noozhawk News 5 March 2018 Available at: www.noozhawk.com\/article\/ waldo_r._tobler_of_santa_barbara_1930_2018<\/a> (Accessed: 27th July 2018).<\/p>\n

This text is based on the obituary co-written with Danny Dorling:
\nDanny Dorling & Benjamin Hennig (2018) Waldo Tobler: Remembering a genius, The Cartographic Journal, 55:3, 303-304, DOI: 10.1080\/00087041.2018.1507181<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Waldo Tobler is dead. 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