The Most Rectangular Places on Earth

Following last week’s failed coup in Turkey, David Barry noticed an awful lot of friends airing their armchair geopolitical analyses on Facebook. One posted a map of the country accompanied by this observation: "Say what you will about Turkey, it is a remarkably rectangular country."

Barry, a Perth-based programmer and digital mapmaker, took that remark and ran with it, to astonishingly nerdy lengths: He devised a method of ranking more than 200 countries, principalities, republics and nation-states according to rectangularity. Pretty scientific stuff here: Barry examined the “maximum percentage overlap” between the area within a nation’s borders and a “rectangle of the same area,” according to his personal website. (He also added a disclaimer related to the digital files smoothly outlining each country’s shape—essentially, objects may be less rectangular in real life than they appear here.)