These are the most rectangular countries around the world

The state of Wyoming in the United States reigns supreme in quadrilaterality.

If you've ever seen its boundary, it looks something like this:

This is because the state borders were intended to be along lines of latitude and longitude, although due to 19th century inaccuracies, this isn't quite the case by roughly half a mile.

So how do countries stack up for being square, given that they were forged by conflict, diplomacy and tectonics?

This is the question that David Barry sought to answer when a Facebook friend noted that Turkey was "a remarkably rectangular country."

He created an algorithm which defined the 'rectangularness' of a country as its maximum percentage overlap with a rectangle of the same area.

Using shapefiles from Natural Earth he then plotted countries for 'rectangularness', finding that Turkey only came fifteenth.

For reference, here are the top ten:

1. Egypt (0.955)

2. Vatican (0.948)

3. Sint Maarten (0.937)

4. Lesotho (0.936)

5. Yemen (0.928)

6. Ghana (0.924)

7. Macedonia (0.921)

8. Côte d'Ivoire (0.919)

9. Poland (0.919)

10. Nauru (0.917)

The UK ranked 159th, with a score of 0.763.

Smaller countries, due to the shapefiles, were represented as quite smooth shapes, which had an effect on the scores - David later recalculated the Vatican with a more detailed shapefile and the index score went from 0.948 to 0.890.

David told indy100 what surprised him most was that he:

thought Nepal would have been in the top 10, but it came in mid-20's - it has a more squiggly border than I'd thought.

David said if he were to do the project again he'd make a number of changes.

I thought 10 people would look at it instead of a hundred thousand!

In hindsight, I'd have taken the time to a) re-project each country so that the shapes are a good approximation of what they look like on the earth's surface (the equirectangular projection distorts badly at high latitudes), and b) tidy up the plots - just showing the main part of each country, instead of having the distant islands messing up the scales, or the problem where a country crosses 180 degrees of longitude.

When asked if he thought there were any interesting trends in the data, which reddit had jokingly tried to investigate, he demurred:

Rectangularity as such, no, I don't think that's a serious topic.

There is an existing line of research into countries with straight line borders - the idea being that colonial powers often defined countries by drawing straight lines on a map, without paying attention to various existing local cultures and where those people lived.

Alesina et al. have a paper on this, but this is not my area and I can't say how robust that research is.

David works in mining geostatistics, having previously produced analysis on the Australian election.

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