Rectangular world? Egypt tops list
Jake Doherty
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NYT NEWS SERVICE
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Countries are compared with one another politically , fi nancially or militarily -so why not rectangularly?
That's what David Barry, an Australian statistician, did in a post on his blog. A comment by a Facebook friend about the “remarkably rectangular country“ of Turkey got Barry thinking about how it might compare with other countries in that regard.He devised a method to take the area inside a country's bor ders and measure its “maximum percentage overlap with a rectangle of the same area.“
Ranking countries -208 in all -in this way , he found Egypt was the most rectangular and Maldives the least. Yemen, Ghana, Macedonia and Ivory Coast are also in the top 10, while island nations like Indonesia, Bahamas, Seychelles and Tonga squiggle their way into bottom 10. Turkey is 15th most rectangular country .
Is it good or bad for a country to be more rectangular? . Barry's analysis does not go into those im plications. Nor does it address the consequences of the straight-line borders that were drawn by colonial powers with little regard for indigenous people and cultures.All it is meant to be is another way to look at geometry of the world.
Inspired by Barry's project, Gonzalo Ciruelos created a method to determine the roundest country . It's Sierra Leone -which is also the 14th most rectangular country .
And yet, the human imagination cannot be bound by perpendicular lines.
Source: Times of India, 22-08-2016
That's what David Barry, an Australian statistician, did in a post on his blog. A comment by a Facebook friend about the “remarkably rectangular country“ of Turkey got Barry thinking about how it might compare with other countries in that regard.He devised a method to take the area inside a country's bor ders and measure its “maximum percentage overlap with a rectangle of the same area.“
Ranking countries -208 in all -in this way , he found Egypt was the most rectangular and Maldives the least. Yemen, Ghana, Macedonia and Ivory Coast are also in the top 10, while island nations like Indonesia, Bahamas, Seychelles and Tonga squiggle their way into bottom 10. Turkey is 15th most rectangular country .
Is it good or bad for a country to be more rectangular? . Barry's analysis does not go into those im plications. Nor does it address the consequences of the straight-line borders that were drawn by colonial powers with little regard for indigenous people and cultures.All it is meant to be is another way to look at geometry of the world.
Inspired by Barry's project, Gonzalo Ciruelos created a method to determine the roundest country . It's Sierra Leone -which is also the 14th most rectangular country .
And yet, the human imagination cannot be bound by perpendicular lines.
Source: Times of India, 22-08-2016
