Arthur Getis
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Education and field
Arthur Getis earned both his B.S. and M.S. in Geography from Pennsylvania State University. In 1961, he earned his Ph.D. in geography at University of Washington Department of Geography. Here, he worked as a doctoral student under William Garrison, a prominent geographer and leader of the quantitative revolution in geography. His doctoral dissertation focused on individual behaviors and how they manifest as collective spatial patterns. This experience would set him on a path to researching spatial statistics as they apply to fields such as retail, public health, and crime clustering, among others.
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Career
Arthur Getis held many academic positions during his four decades-long career. After graduating from the University of Washington, Getis took a position at Rutgers University Livingston College in 1963, where he did groundbreaking research in the discipline of spatial analysis. Getis Left Rutgers in 1977 for a position in the geography department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he served as department head. In 1990, Getis left University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to work at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he headed a new joint Ph.D. program. In addition to these academic positions, he also held visiting professorships at the University of Bristol and the University of Cambridge.
During his career, Getis focused his research on spatial descriptive statistics, where he focused on topics like spatial autocorrelation, k-function analysis, and their applications to real-world problems. Working with Keith Ord, he created the innovative and highly influential Getis-Ord family of statistics.
Getis collaborated with numerous geographers throughout his career to advance GIScience, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and geography as a whole. With Luc Anselin, Getis worked to explore the then-new technology of GIS. As the concept of computer cartography was only introduced in 1959 by Waldo Tobler, and the term "geographic information systems" introduced in the 1960s by Roger Tomlinson, this research was extremely influential in laying the foundation for GIS, and modern cartography. Getis worked with geographer Michael Goodchild to establish GIScience foundations in academia, advancing the discipline.
Getis worked with Manfred M. Fischer to found the Journal of Geographical Systems in 1994. This journal focuses on both theoretical and applied spatial modeling, methods, and results. Getis served as one of the editors-in-chief for this journal from 1994 to 2007, and as an honorary editor from 2008 until his death in 2022.
Getis served on the board of directors for the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS) from 1997 to 2001, when he was elected the organization's president, serving between 2001 and 2002. After serving as president of UCGIS, Getis was on the executive committee until 2004.
Getis-Ord family of statistics
The most influential work of Getis is his and Keith Ord's creation of the Getis-Ord family of statistics, which includes the Getis-Ord General G and Getis-Ord Gi* statistic. Based on a 1992 paper titled "The Analysis of Spatial Association by Use of Distance Statistics" and a 1995 paper titled "Local Spatial Autocorrelation: Distributional Issues and an Application", the Getis-Ord family of statistics are used extensively in spatial statistics. These are used to detect clustering of high or low values within a study area. The Getis-Ord family of statistics compliment Moran's I and Geary's C in looking at the spatial autocorrelation of phenomena in a study area.
The Getis-Ord family of statistics has been applied across a variety of disciplines, including epidemiology/public health, land use, crime analysis, and economics. They are used as the basis for "Hot spot analysis," "High/Low clustering analysis," and the creation of "Hot spot" maps by Esri software, such as ArcGIS.
Personal life
Getis was born and raised in Pennsylvania and was the youngest child of Samuel and Sophie (Zeitzew) Getis. He met Judith (Marckwardt) Getis while at the University of Washington, who he married in 1961 and had three daughters with. He enjoyed traveling, tennis, bridge, and scrabble.