Geographer

A geographer is a physical scientist, social scientist or humanist whose area of study is geography, the study of Earth's natural environment and human society, including how society and nature interacts. The Greek prefix "geo" means "earth" and the Greek suffix, "graphy", meaning "description", so a geographer is someone who studies the earth.^[1] The word "geography" is a Middle French word that is believed to have been first used in 1540.^[2]

Although geographers are historically known as people who make

In particular, physical geographers study the natural environment while human geographers study human society and culture. Some geographers are practitioners of GIS (geographic information system) and are often employed by local, state, and federal government agencies as well as in the private sector by environmental and engineering firms.^[4]

The paintings by Johannes Vermeer titled The Geographer and The Astronomer are both thought to represent the growing influence and rise in prominence of scientific enquiry in Europe at the time of their painting in 1668–69.

History of geography
Graeco-Roman Chinese Islamic Age of Discovery History of cartography Historical geography Environmental determinism Regional geography Quantitative revolution Critical geography
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Subdividing geography is challenging, as the discipline is broad, interdisciplinary, ancient, and has been approached differently by different cultures. Attempts have gone back centuries, and include the "Four traditions of geography" and applied "branches."^[5][6][7]

The four traditions of geography were proposed in 1964 by William D. Pattison in a paper titled "The Four Traditions of Geography" appearing in the Journal of Geography.^[5][8] These traditions are:

• spatial or locational tradition^[5][8]
• area studies or regional tradition^[5][8]
• Human-Environment interaction tradition (originally referred to as the "man-land tradition")^[5][8]
• Earth science tradition^[5][8]

The UNESCO Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems subdivides geography into three major fields of study, which are then further subdivided.^[6][7] These are:

• marketing geography, health geography, and social geography.^[9]
• environmental geography.^[10]
• Technical geography: including geoinformatics, Geographic information science, geovisualization, and spatial analysis.

The National Geographic Society identifies five broad key themes for geographers:

• human-environment interaction
• Location
• Movement
• Place
• Regions^[11]

• Cosmos
  and founder of the sub-field biogeography.
• Arnold Henry Guyot (1807–1884) – noted the structure of glaciers and advanced understanding in glacier motion, especially in fast ice flow.
• Carl O. Sauer (1889–1975) – cultural geographer.
• Carl Ritter (1779–1859) – occupied the first chair of geography at Berlin University.
• Vautrin Lud Prize
  .
• Doreen Massey (1944–2016) – scholar in the space and places of globalization and its pluralities; winner of the Vautrin Lud Prize.
• Edward Soja (1940–2015) – worked on regional development, planning and governance and coined the terms synekism and postmetropolis; winner of the Vautrin Lud Prize.
• Ellen Churchill Semple (1863–1932) – first female president of the American Association of Geographers.
• Jovan Cvijić (1865–1927) – Serbian geographer, geologist, sociologist and human geographer; father of the karst geomorphology
• Eratosthenes (c. 276 – c. 195/194 BC) – calculated the size of the Earth.
• Ernest Burgess (1886–1966) – creator of the concentric zone model.
• Gerardus Mercator (1512–1594) – cartographer who produced the Mercator projection
• John Francon Williams (1854–1911) – author of The Geography of the Oceans.
• Karl Butzer (1934–2016) – German-American geographer, cultural ecologist and environmental archaeologist.
• Michael Frank Goodchild (born 1944) – GIS scholar and winner of the RGS founder's medal in 2003.
• Milton Santos (1926–2001) – became known for his pioneering works in several branches of geography, notably urban development in developing countries.
• Muhammad al-Idrisi (Arabic: أبو عبد الله محمد الإدريسي; Latin: Dreses) (1100–1165) – author of Nuzhatul Mushtaq.
• Nigel Thrift (born 1949) – originator of non-representational theory.
• Paul Vidal de La Blache (1845–1918) – founder of the French school of geopolitics, wrote the principles of human geography.
• Geographia
  .
• Radhanath Sikdar (1813–1870) – calculated the height of Mount Everest.
• geographic information systems
  .
• Halford Mackinder (1861–1947) – co-founder of the London School of Economics, Geographical Association.
• Strabo (64/63 BC – c. AD 24) – wrote Geographica, one of the first books outlining the study of geography.
• Waldo Tobler (1930-2018) – coined the first law of geography
  .
• Walter Christaller (1893–1969) – human geographer and inventor of central place theory.
• William Morris Davis (1850–1934) – father of American geography and developer of the cycle of erosion.
• Yi-Fu Tuan (1930-2022) – Chinese-American scholar credited with starting humanistic geography as a discipline.

• American Association of Geographers^[12]
• American Geographical Society^[13]
• North American Cartographic Information Society
• Anton Melik Geographical Institute (Slovenia)
• Gamma Theta Upsilon (international)
• Institute of Geographical Information Systems (Pakistan)
• International Geographical Union
• Karachi Geographical Society (Pakistan)
• National Geographic Society (US)^[14]
• Royal Canadian Geographical Society
• Royal Danish Geographical Society
• Royal Geographical Society (UK)^[15]
• Russian Geographical Society