Torsten Hägerstrand

Torsten Hägerstrand (October 11, 1916, in Moheda – May 3, 2004, in Lund) was a Swedish geographer. He is known for his work on migration, cultural diffusion and time geography.

Quotes

• If we look away from certain rather new sorts of purely theoretical investigations which can be undertaken without very much of an observational base, geographical research almost by definition has to be founded on empirical data. However, we do not need just a few scattered observations but, more often, information in very large quantities.
  • From Hägerstrand's 1967 article in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers titled The Computer and the Geographer

• In fact to us as geographers the computer is a friendly animal because it likes to handle information in the way that we prefer to have it. So, for example, when it comes to the location of data, the use of ordinary geographical names of places and areas is very inconvenient, but the use of x-y coordinates works excellently. And such coordinates, ofcourse, are the spatial equivalents of the physical units which are used for measuring time.
  • From Hägerstrand's 1967 article in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers titled The Computer and the Geographer