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Comment by s1artibartfast | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure what median Center of population means. Mean would be the geographic center accounting for location. Is the median just the 50th percentile in latitude and longitude?

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I would guess it means 25% live in each quadrant of the map here:

https://www2.census.gov/geo/maps/DC2020/PopCenter/CenterPop_...

Not quite: half are on the left, and half are on the right of the vertical line; and half are on the bottom and half on the top of the horizontal line.

Make a list of lat/long for every person, pick the middle entries?

Someone else posted this link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_median

It’s the point the that minimizes the distance to all the input points in Euclidean space.

I'm going to guess this isn't what they actually mean. It's more likely just the spot where an equal number of people live left and right as well as above and below it.

You might be right, but I was more curious about what a technically accurate reading of the statement would mean.

OK, so it is basically/usually the a real data point closest to the mean location.

For something like population, where there are few gaps in data points, you would expect them to be basically the same because there is probably someone within a few miles of the mean.

This means that an extra person in Hawaii impact the "median center of population" more than an extra person in San Francisco because the mean is part of the calculation, opposed to just a stack ranking. Is this correct?

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