# Beyond Four Corners, USA

Posted 4 years ago
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# Introduction

I recently saw a TV show set at Four Corners USA, the point where Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico meet:

It made me wonder how frequent 4 or more geographical borders meet at one point. According to Wikipedia, 4 borders meeting at a point is called a quadripoint, 5 borders meeting is called a quintipoint, and in general it's called a multipoint. The entry only lists one quintipoint and goes on to say

Perhaps a dozen quintipoints of various levels of geopolitical subdivisions are scattered around the world;

This piqued my interest to find all multipoints, using the Wolfram Language.

# Results

Before I give the details on how to detect multipoints, I'd like to showcase the results.

### Summary

• Since borders are not always precise (or even well defined at times), I allowed for an error up to ~100 meters when classifying points.
• The polygons were obtained from the "Country" and "AdministrativeDivision" Entity types (about 40,000 in total).
• There are a total of 724 quadripoints in this dataset.
• There are a total of 13 quintipoints in this dataset.
• There is 1 10-point in this dataset!
• There are only 6 multipoints in the dataset whose regions don't share the same parent region.

With 724 quadripoints, there are too many to list here, but here are a few interesting ones.

• The only countries to form a quadripoint are Namibia, Botswana, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

• There are a considerable amount of counties in Iowa and Texas that are apart of multiple quadripoints, i.e. more than one corner is a quadripoint. This is because they are roughly arranged in a rectangular grid.

• There were only 6 quadripoints found whose partent regions differ:

• Here's a visual summary of all quadripoints found (note the level 3 regions were heavily thickened to become visible):

### Quintipoints

Here are all 13 quintipoints found:

• Saint Kitts and Nevis: Saint George Gingerland - Saint James Windward - Saint John Figtree - Saint Paul Charlestown - Saint Thomas Lowland
• Boyaca, Colombia: Chinavita - Garagoa - Miraflores - Ramiriquí - Zetaquirá
• Counties in Florida, USA: Glades - Hendry - Martin - Okeechobee - Palm Beach
• Usulutan, El Salvador: California - Ozatlán - Santa Elena - Tecapán - Usulután
• Arequipa, Arequipa, Peru: Alto Selva Alegre - Cayma - Chiguata - Miraflores - San Juan de Tarucani
• Cuenca, Azuay, Ecuador: Chiquintad - Cuenca - Ricaurte - Sidcay - Sinicay
• Pea Reang, Prey Vêng, Cambodia: Kampong Popil - Mesa Prachan - Prey Sralet - Reab - Roka
• Rieti, Lazio, Italy: Borgo Velino - Castel Sant' Angelo - Cittaducale - Micigliano - Rieti
• Cosenza, Calabria, Italy: Marano Marchesato - Marano Principato - Rende - San Fili - San Lucido
• Napoli, Campania, Italy: Boscotrecase - Ercolano - Ottaviano - Torre Del Greco - Trecase
• Savona, Liguria, Italy: Bardineto - Boissano - Giustenice - Loano - Pietra Ligure
• Torino, Piemonte, Italy: Cuceglio - Mercenasco - Montalenghe - Scarmagno - Vialfrè
• Viterbo, Lazio, Italy: Bolsena - Capodimonte - Gradoli - Montefiascone - San Lorenzo Nuovo

As you can see, Italy takes the cake with 6 quintipoints! Here's a visual of these quintipoints, along with the error allowing them to be classified as such:

### A Near 6-point

Notice in the top right map above, it looks like there is room for one more region in Viterbo, Lazio, Italy, which would make it a 6-point. Here's the 6th region (Grotte Di Castro) in black:

It turns out Grotte Di Castro is about 700 meters from the quintipoint, making this only a near 6-point:

### 10-point

As mentioned in the Wikipedia entry, there is a 10-point in Italy at the summit of Mount Etna:

• Catania, Sicily, Italy: Adrano - Belpasso - Biancavilla - Bronte - Castiglione Di Sicilia - Maletto - Nicolosi - Randazzo - Sant' Alfio - Zafferana Etnea

### Allowing for more error

If we allow for more error, we can find near-multipoints - regions that almost have a multipoint, but clearly don't. For example, there is a near-quintipoint in Texas, USA:

# Code

The idea to find multipoints within a collection of regions is as follows:

1. Obtain the Polygon for each region.
2. For each pair of regions, if there's a vertex from one of the polygons which is "close" to the other, mark these regions as touching. RegionDistance can be used for this.
3. The relation of touching between pairs forms an adjacency matrix. From this, form a Graph and use FindClique to find all multipoints in this collection.

Here is code that does just that:

discretize[Polygon[pts_?MatrixQ]] :=
MeshRegion[pts, Polygon[Range[Length[pts]]]]
discretize[Polygon[pts_?(VectorQ[#, MatrixQ]&)]] :=
MeshRegion[Join @@ pts, Polygon[Range[#+1, #2]& @@@ Partition[Prepend[Accumulate[Map[Length, pts]], 0], 2, 1]]]

polyLookup = discretize /@ (Join[
EntityValue["Country", "Polygon", "EntityAssociation"],
] /. GeoPosition -> Identity);

MultiPoints[divs_List, n_] /; Length[divs] < n = {};

MultiPoints[divs_List, n_] :=
Block[{polys, disj, cands},
polys = polyLookup /@ divs;
(
disj = Boole[Outer[CoordinateNear, polys, polys]] - IdentityMatrix[Length[divs]];
(
cands = FindClique[AdjacencyGraph[divs, disj], {n, ?}, All];

) /; MatrixQ[disj, IntegerQ]

) /; VectorQ[polys, MeshRegionQ]
]
MultiPoints[___] = {};

$tol = 0.001; CoordinateNear[mr1_, mr2_, tol_:$tol] :=
With[{? = {{-tol, tol}, {-tol, tol}}},
And[
NoneTrue[Transpose[{?+RegionBounds[mr1], ?+RegionBounds[mr2]}], #1[[2,1]] > #1[[1,2]] || #1[[1,1]] > #1[[2,2]]&],
Min[RegionDistance[mr1, MeshCoordinates[mr2]]] < tol
]
]

resolveMultiPoints[{}, _] = {};
resolveMultiPoints[cands_List, passoc_?AssociationQ] :=
Select[cands, MultiPointQ[#, passoc]&]

MultiPointQ[cands_, passoc_?AssociationQ, tol_:$tol] := Block[{coords, mrs}, mrs = passoc /@ cands; coords = Union @@ MeshCoordinates /@ mrs; Or @@ Thread[And @@ (Thread[RegionDistance[#, coords] < tol]& /@ mrs)] ]  Now here's all multipoints formed from countries: Now to explore all cases, we can start off by looking for multipoints in all subdivisions of a given region, e.g. given Florida, find all multipoints within the counties of Florida. This can be achieved by building a hierarchical graph connecting countries and administrative divisions. Then for a given region, this graph can be used to find all subdivisions and the above code can be used to find the multipoints. ad = AdministrativeDivisionData[]; pr = EntityValue["AdministrativeDivision", "ParentRegion"];$ADNetwork = Graph[Join[
]];

ChildrenMultiPoints[reg_, o___] :=
MultiPoints[Rest[VertexOutComponent[$ADNetwork, reg, 1]], o]  Lastly, to cover all cases we need to consider sets of regions that have differing parent regions. To do this, for a given parent region$P$, first find all other regions$R_i$(on the same level) that touch this region. Then simply run MultiPoints on all subdivisions in$P \cup R_i\$. I omit this code here, as there were only 6 instances that came out of this case.

8 Replies
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Posted 4 years ago
 - another post of yours has been selected for the Staff Picks group, congratulations !We are happy to see you at the top of the "Featured Contributor" board. Thank you for your wonderful contributions, and please keep them coming!
Posted 4 years ago
 Just logged in to give it a thumbs up! Very nice! Great work!
Posted 4 years ago
 Thanks!
Posted 4 years ago
 I visited the four corners area of the USA a few months ago. It isn't close to anything, so you really have to want to see it to make the trip. Couples who go usually have their picture taken kissing at the four corner point. Native Americans sell their wares along the circumference of a large circle surrounding the four corners.This is a great post and I really enjoyed it very much. Thanks for a terrific job!!!
Posted 4 years ago
 Wonderful! First class job! One of the best posts I've seen here!
Posted 4 years ago
 Interesting and fun topic. Well explained and worked out. Thank you.