One of geography's most productive scholars, Brian Berry has played an enormously influential role in urban and economic geography, primarily as the steadfast defender of traditional quantitative modeling. Not without reason, Gordon Clark argues that “Brian Berry is perhaps the most important of a handful of people who transformed human geography over the second half of the twentieth century.”

Born in 1934 to working-class parents in England (both of whom left school at age 14), Berry defied the confines of the British class system to rise to the top-most tiers of academia. He completed a BS in economics at the London School of Economics in 1955, where he was exposed to historical geography and introduced to the quantitative modeling of spatial phenomena. Immediately thereafter, he traveled ...