What’s the world’s center of population?
The center of population for a region is, roughly, the center of mass of the inhabitants. The Census bureau defines the center of population of the US (currently in Missouri) as
the point at which an imaginary, flat, weightless, and rigid map of the United States would balance perfectly if weights of identical value were placed on it so that each weight represented the location of one person on the date of the census.
This definition breaks down for populations on curved surfaces. For the earth as a whole, the center of mass obviously falls deep inside the planet.
This problem is easy to fix. I figure a better definition would be the point at which the sum of straight-line surface distances to each person is minimized. This is equivalent to the standard definition for a flat region, but it has the advantage that you can use it to define the center of population for a sphere.
I’ve never seen anyone who’s calculated the earth’s center of population so defined, but it doesn’t seem like it would be hard. Does anyone have the answer?
Bonus: find the center of population for other groups. What is the center of population of native English speakers? internet users? … bloggers?
Edit: I was standing the shower just now when I realized that the generalization I was using had to be wrong. I got it from this page on Wolfram Mathworld,
The centroid of
point masses also gives the location at which a school should be built in order to minimize the distance travelled by children from
cities, located at the positions of the masses, and with
equal to the number of students from city
(Steinhaus 1999, pp. 113-116).
and did try to check out the citation while writing, but it was to a book and I was much too lazy for that. However, I think the Wolfram paraphrasing is wrong — it’s not the distances that are minimized; it must be some other quantity. You can see that this is wrong for center-of-mass of two people at A and one person at B. It’s probably sums of squares that are minimized (as suggested in a comment, and which works for the three-person example) but I don’t see an obvious proof of this.
xkcd 