Richard Hartshorne was an influential early- and mid-20th-century American geographer, best known for his aggressive promotion of chorology as the optimal way of examining landscapes and spatial distributions.

Born and raised in Pennsylvania, he became a math major at Princeton University, completing his degree in 1920 after serving in World War I. Hartshorne then earned a PhD from the University of Chicago in 1924, taking courses from Ellen Semple, J. Paul Goode, and social ecologists such as Harlan Barrows. He was greatly influenced by Alfred Hettner, who led him into neo-Kantian ideas and views of space and, to a lesser extent, environmental determinism. At the University of Minnesota (where he taught from 1924 to 1940) and the University of Wisconsin (where he taught from 1940 to ...