Waldo R. Tobler (1930–2018)

"Waldo R. Tobler (1930–2018)." Imago Mundi, 71(1), pp. 87–88

Notes

1. For a more conventional obituary, see Keith C. Clarke, ‘Waldo R. Tobler (1930–2018)’, Cartography and Geographic Information Science 45:4 (2018): 287–88.

2. Waldo Tobler, ‘A new companion for Mercator’, Cartography and Geographic Information Science 45:3 (2018): 284–85, quotation on 285.

3. Tobler published a translation of Lambert’s seminal monograph in 1972 and a revised edition four decades later. J. H. Lambert, Notes and Comments on the Composition of Terrestrial and Celestial Maps, trans. W. R. Tobler (1st ed., Ann Arbor, University of Michigan, 1972; 2nd ed., Redlands, CA, ESRI Press, 2011); originally published in 1772. McBryde’s most important work was co-authored with mathematician Paul Thomas; see F. Webster McBryde and Paul D. Thomas, Equal-Area Projections for World Statistical Maps, US Coast and Geodetic Survey special publication no. 245 (Washington, DC, Government Printing Office, 1949).

4. Waldo R. Tobler, ‘Geographic area and map projection’, Geographical Review 53:1 (1963): 59–78; and Waldo R. Tobler, ‘A classification of map projections’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 52:2 (1962): 167–75.

5. Waldo R. Tobler, ‘Medieval distortions: the projections of ancient maps’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 56:2 (1966): 351–60; W. R. Tobler, ‘Bidimensional regression’, Geographical Analysis 26:3 (1994): 187–212, esp. 200–6; and Waldo R. Tobler, ‘Numerical approaches to map projections’, in Beiträge zur theoretischen Kartographie: Festschrift für Erik Arnberger, ed. Ingrid Kretschmer (Wien, Franz Deuticke, 1977), 51–64.

6. Keith D. Lilley, Christopher D. Lloyd, with Bruce M. S. Campbell, ‘Mapping the realm: a new look at the Gough map of Britain (c.1360)’, Imago Mundi 61:1 (2009): 1–28; and Joaquim Alves Gaspar and Henrique Leitão, ‘What is a nautical chart really? Uncovering the geometry of early modern nautical charts’, Journal of Cultural Heritage 29 (2018): 130–36. Also see Joaquim Alves Gaspar, ‘Using empirical map projections for modeling early nautical charts’, in Advances in Cartography and GIScience: Selection from ICC 2011, Paris, ed. Anne Russ (Berlin and Heidelberg, Springer-Verlag, 2011), 2: 227–47.

7. Waldo Tobler, ‘Ma vie’, in Geographical Voices: Fourteen Autobiographical Essays, ed. Peter Gould and Forrest Ralph Pitts (Syracuse, Syracuse University Press, 2002), 293–322, quotation on 311.

8. Ibid., 315.

9. W. R. Tobler, ‘A computer movie simulating urban growth in the Detroit region’, Economic Geography 46: supplement (1970): 234–40, quotation on 234. For a recent encomium, see João Francisco de Abreu, ‘First law of geography, first computer map, cartograms, analytical cartography, wind model — tribute to Waldo Tobler: scientist, geographer, cartographer’, Annals of GIS (2018): 1–2 (published online 4 May 2018).

10. Keith C. Clarke, ‘Tobler, Waldo R(udolph)’, in The History of Cartography, vol. 6: Cartography in the Twentieth Century, ed. Mark Monmonier (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2015), pt. 2: 1534–35.