Since I seem to be on a kick of writing about key theories I didn’t learn in school (and perhaps I am a bit burned out thinking about politics and climate change, and I don’t have any amazing new technologies to share today), here is the first law of geography:

The first law of geography was developed by Waldo Tobler in 1970 and it makes the observation that ‘everything is usually related to all else but those which are near to each other are more related when compared to those that are further away’.  This observation which Tobler made is closely related to the ‘Law of Universal Gravitation’ and the ‘Law of Demand’ as well. The concept was first applied by Tobler to urban growth systems and was not popularly received when it was first published.  It wasn’t until the 1990s when this formulation of the concept of spatial autocorrelation became an important underlying concept in the field of GIS.