Nineteen geographers were honored for their 50 years of continuous membership in the Association of American Geographers during the AAG Annual Awards Luncheon held in Seattle on April 16, including our own Professor Emeritus Waldo Tobler and Arthur Getis, Distinguished Professor, Emeritus, of the Department of Geography at San Diego State University. Dr. Getis, our most recent Geography Colloquium speaker, is closely affiliated with UCSB Geography insofar as SDSU and UCSB have a joint PhD program in the discipline. The joint PhD program is distinctive in that it brings together two outstanding departments that complement each other. California State Universities do not offer stand-alone doctoral programs; the joint doctorate program thereby provides mutual benefits for two of the strongest research-oriented Geography departments in the U.S.
Dr. Getis holds BS and MS degrees in Geography from The Pennsylvania State University and a PhD in Geography from the University of Washington, and his areas of research include spatial statistics, pattern analysis, urban geography, disease and crime clustering, and geographic information sciences. As a student of William Garrison at UW, Getis was one of the original leaders in launching the “quantitative revolution” in Geography, and he has remained a prominent leader throughout his career. Getis is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Geographical Systems, he won the Distinguished Scholarship Award from the Association of American Geographers in 2002, he was elected a Fellow of the Regional Science Association International in 2005, he won the GISSG Aangeenbrug Award in 2008, and in 2010 he was awarded University Consortium of Geographic Information Science (UCGIS) Fellow status to recognize his outstanding impact on the field of GIScience as well as for his service to UCGIS (more here).
Waldo Tobler received his degrees in Geography from the University of Washington in Seattle where he also studied under William Garrison, spent several years at the University of Michigan, and is currently Professor Emeritus at UCSB where, until his retirement, he held the positions of Professor of Geography and Professor of Statistics. The University of Zurich, Switzerland, awarded him a Doctorate honoris causa in 1988. Courses taught have included the History of Cartography, Geographic Transformations, and Migration. Dr. Tobler was one of the principal investigators and a Senior Scientist in the National Science Foundation sponsored National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis. He has used computers in geographic research for over forty years, with emphasis on mathematical modeling and graphic interpretations. Well-known for his publications, he formulated the “first law of geography” in 1970 while producing a computer movie and is the inventor of novel and unusual map projections, among which was the first derivation of the partial differential equations for area cartograms. He also invented a method for smooth two-dimensional mass-preserving areal data redistribution, and his latest ideas concern the development of smooth finite element and categorical pycnophylactic geographic information reallocation models (more here).
