The problem of scale pervades both the natural sciences and the vi sual arts. The earliest scientific discussions concentrate on visual per ception (much like today ) and occur in Euclid's (c. 300 B. C. ) Optics and Lucretius' (c. 100-55 B. C. ) On the Nature of the Universe. A very clear account in the spirit of modern "scale-space theory" is presented by Boscovitz (in 1758), with wide ranging applications to mathemat ics, physics and geography. Early applications occur in the cartographic problem of "generalization," the central idea being that a map in order to be useful has to be a...

The problem of scale pervades both the natural sciences and the vi sual arts. The earliest scientific discussions concentrate on visual per ception (much like today ) and occur in Euclid's (c. 300 B. C. ) Optics and Lucretius' (c. 100-55 B. C. ) On the Nature of the Universe. A very clear account in the spirit of modern "scale-space theory" is presented by Boscovitz (in 1758), with wide ranging applications to mathemat ics, physics and geography. Early applications occur in the cartographic problem of "generalization," the central idea being that a map in order to be useful has to be a...