{"id":780,"date":"2026-08-25T07:13:59","date_gmt":"2026-08-25T07:13:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/2026\/08\/25\/why-are-rivers-so-mathematical-quanta-magazine\/"},"modified":"2026-08-25T07:13:59","modified_gmt":"2026-08-25T07:13:59","slug":"why-are-rivers-so-mathematical-quanta-magazine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/2026\/08\/25\/why-are-rivers-so-mathematical-quanta-magazine\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Are Rivers So Mathematical? | Quanta Magazine"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>Every square inch of land on Earth\u2019s surface receives precipitation, and much of it drains out, eventually, to an ocean or lake. Rivers are the drainage system.<br \/>\nIn 1957, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist named John Hack discovered the most important law of river networks. In rivers and streams in Virginia and Maryland, Hack measured the length of each stream and the area of the land that slopes toward that stream and therefore drains into it, called its basin or drainage area. What he discovered is now known as Hack\u2019s law: Any stream, from the littlest brook to the mightiest river, has a length that\u2019s proportional to its drainage area raised to the power of 0.6. (In symbolic form: L ~ A0.6.) There\u2019s a bit of variance around that 0.6 value \u2014 Earth is, after all, a complicated place \u2014 but \u201cthe general regularity of the relation is nevertheless remarkable,\u201d Hack wrote (opens a new tab). \u201cStream lengths tend to increase proportionally to the 0.6 power of the drainage area, regardless of the geological or structural characteristics of the area.\u201d<br \/>\n\u2014 Read on <a href=\"https:\/\/www.quantamagazine.org\/why-are-rivers-so-mathematical-20260810\/\">www.quantamagazine.org\/why-are-rivers-so-mathematical-20260810\/<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Every square inch of land on Earth\u2019s surface receives precipitation, and much of it drains out, eventually, to an ocean or lake. Rivers are the drainage system. In 1957, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist named John Hack discovered the most important law of river networks. In rivers and streams in Virginia and Maryland, Hack measured [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[188,189,190],"class_list":["post-780","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-geography","tag-maths","tag-rivers"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/780","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=780"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/780\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}