ABSTRACT
Traditional work in human geography and regional science have at least implicitly been based on a general ideal of minimization of effort. Nowhere has this come out more clearly than in the works in social physics by Zipf, Stewart and others. Their ideas about human behavior and least effort can of course be directly related to such fundamental optimality principles in physics as Fermat's principle of least time in geometrical optics, and Maupertii and Hamilton's principles of least action and conservation of energy in mechanical systems. It has not been possible to specify the properties of this Henry Moore-like structure. The future work in theoretical geography will be devoted to the search for mathematical transformation functions that can be used to described complex realities in such terms. This chapter was written with the twofold purpose of isolating promising trends in today's theoretical geography and to extrapolate some of these into the future.
