Gould, Peter (1932–2000)

One of the discipline's most creative and diverse thinkers, Peter R. Gould wrote about a wide variety of topics in geography, ranging from transportation to AIDS to television to critiques of Marxism. During his career, he authored 20 books and monographs and 170 journal articles. Fluent in French, he also published in that language.

Born and raised in England, he was evacuated to the United States during World War II. Returning to England afterward, he attended the Nautical College, graduating in 1951. Immediately thereafter, he served with the British military against communist guerrillas in Malaysia. In 1956, he graduated from Colgate University, and he went on to do graduate work at Northwestern University, completing his PhD in 1960. Initially an Africanist, he journeyed widely and conducted fieldwork in that continent before assuming a faculty position at Syracuse University. In 1963, he moved to the Pennsylvania State University (Penn State), where he remained for the next 35 years, taking sabbaticals in a variety of countries. He retired in 1998 and died of cancer shortly thereafter.

Gould was eclectic in his research interests. He maintained a fascination with the structure of cognition, and his early work included the study of mental maps and residential preference surfaces. He was also deeply interested in issues of geographic philosophy. Although he was certainly not an empiricist, he exhibited a deep distrust of armchair theorizing and rigidly held views that led inexorably to predetermined theoretical conclusions, a fault he often attributed to Marxism. He pursued Heideggerian phenomenology as a means of comprehending human experience. He could be polemical, and he challenged feminist geographers and postmodernists in ways that were often disconcerting and earned him considerable criticism. Gould had an abiding love for mathematics, which he deployed in novel ways, and helped propel the quantitative revolution. Among his favored techniques were linear programming, game theory, entropy maximization, and eigenvalues. He was an enthusiastic advocate of Q-analysis, a sophisticated combinatorial technique derived from set theory, as a means of [Page 1357]uncovering the deep structure of empirical reality, and he applied this method to different topics, including the international diffusion of television shows. He wrote about the diffusion of AIDS, employing novel forms of cartography to explore its temporal and spatial dimensions. Gould also authored a volume on the nuclear accident at Chernobyl and the wide cloud of radioactive material it unleashed.

Finally, Gould was a highly committed and innovative teacher greatly concerned about issues of pedagogy. Spatial Organization: The Geographer's View of the World, coauthored with Ronald Abler and John Adams, was pioneering in integrating diverse strains of the discipline for undergraduate students. Drawing on a lifetime of experience, his volumes Geographer at Work and Becoming a Geographer earned him great acclaim. On his death, Penn State created the Peter Gould Geo-Center for the promulgation of geographic thought and teaching.