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| The land frontier between Portugal and Spain is one of the oldest and longest in Europe. In 1961 L.F. Richardson published a paper entitled "The Problem of Contiguity: An Appendix to 'Statistics of Deadly Quarrels' ", where he tackled the problem of determining the real length of coastlines or geographical borders between two countries. Noting that in many cases neighbour countries didn't agree about the length of their common frontier, he showed that the
length of a coastline or a land frontier depended upon the yardstick or scale with which this length was measured. This prevalent phenomenon is commonly refered as the 'Richardson effect'. In his paper, Richardson also derived a log-linear relationship between length and scale and this log-log scatter plot of perimeter lengths versus scale intervals came to be known as a 'Richardson plot'. In late 60s, Mandelbrot related the Richardson effect with fractal geometry, this way unvealing the fractal dimension of coastlines and land frontiers. |
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