In the history of geography, the quantitative revolution (QR or Quantitative Revolution) was one of the four major turning-points of modern geography -- the other three being environmental determinism, regional geography and critical geography). The quantitative revolution occurred during the 1950s and 1960s and marked a rapid change in the method behind geographical research, from regional geography into a spatial science. The main claim for the quantitative revolution is that it led to a shift from a descriptive (idiographic) geography to an empirical law-making (nomothetic) geography.
(Note: The quantitative revolution had occurred earlier in economics and psychology and contemporaneously in political science and other social sciences and to a lesser extent in history.)
Read more about Quantitative Revolution: Synopsis and Background, The 1950s Crisis in Geography, The Revolution, Post-revolution Geography, Additional Reading
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“But a cultivated man becomes ashamed of his property, out of new respect for his nature. Especially he hates what he has if he see that it is accidental,—came to him by inheritance, or gift, or crime; then he feels that it is not having; it does not belong to him, has no root in him and merely lies there because no revolution or no robber takes it away.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)