Thunder Bay is a city in, the seat of, Thunder Bay District, Canada. It is the most populous municipality in Northwestern Ontario with a population of 107,909 as of the Canada 2016 Census, the second most populous in Northern Ontario after Greater Sudbury. Located on Lake Superior, the census metropolitan area of Thunder Bay has a population of 121,621, consists of the city of Thunder Bay, the municipalities of Oliver Paipoonge and Neebing, the townships of Shuniah, Conmee, O'Connor, Gillies, the Fort William First Nation. European settlement in the region began in the late 17th century with a French fur trading outpost on the banks of the Kaministiquia River, it grew into an important transportation hub with its port forming an important link in the shipping of grain and other products from western Canada, through the Great Lakes and the Saint Lawrence Seaway, to the east coast. Forestry and manufacturing played important roles in the city's economy, they have declined in recent years, but have been replaced by a "knowledge economy" based on medical research and education.

Thunder Bay is the site of the Thunder Bay Regional Health Research Institute. The city takes its name from the immense Thunder Bay at the head of Lake Superior, known on 18th-century French maps as Baie du Tonnerre; the city is referred to as the "Lakehead", or "Canadian Lakehead", because of its location at the end of Great Lakes navigation on the Canadian side of the border. European settlement at Thunder Bay began with two French fur trading posts which were subsequently abandoned. In 1803, the Montreal-based North West Company established Fort William as its mid-continent entrepôt; the fort thrived until 1821 when the North West Company merged with the Hudson's Bay Company, Fort William was no longer needed. By the 1850s, the Province of Canada began to take an interest in its western extremity. Discovery of copper in the Keweenaw Peninsula of Michigan had prompted a national demand for mining locations on the Canadian shores of Lake Superior. In 1849, French-speaking Jesuits established the Mission de l'Immaculée-Conception on the Kaministiquia to evangelize the Ojibwe.

The Province of Canada negotiated the Robinson Treaty in 1850 with the Ojibwa of Lake Superior. As a result, an Indian reserve was set aside for them south of the Kaministiquia River. In 1859–60, the Department of Crown Lands surveyed two townships and the Town Plot of Fort William for European-Canadian settlement. Another settlement developed a few miles to the north of Fort William after construction by the federal Department of Public Works of a road connecting Lake Superior with the Red River Colony; the work was directed by Simon James Dawson. This public works depot or construction headquarters acquired its first name in May 1870 when Colonel Garnet Wolseley named it Prince Arthur's Landing, it was renamed Port Arthur by the Canadian Pacific Railway in May 1883. The arrival of the CPR in 1875 sparked a long rivalry between the towns, which did not end until their amalgamation in 1970; until the 1880s, Port Arthur was a much larger and dynamic community. The CPR, in collaboration with the Hudson's Bay Company, preferred east Fort William, located on the lower Kaministiquia River where the fur trade posts were.

Provoked by a prolonged tax dispute with Port Arthur and its seizure of a locomotive in 1889, the CPR relocated all its employees and facilities to Fort William. The collapse of silver mining after 1890 undermined the economy of Port Arthur, it had an economic depression. In the era of Sir Wilfried Laurier, Thunder Bay began a period of extraordinary growth, based on improved access to markets via the transcontinental railway and development of the western wheat boom; the CPR double-tracked its Winnipeg–Thunder Bay line. The Canadian Northern Railway established facilities at Port Arthur; the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway began construction of its facilities at the Fort William Mission in 1905, the federal government began construction of the National Transcontinental Railway. Grain elevator construction boomed as the volume of grain shipped to Europe increased. Both cities incurred debt to grant bonuses to manufacturing industries. By 1914, the twin cities had modern infrastructures Both Fort William and Port Arthur were proponents of municipal ownership.

As early as 1892, Port Arthur built Canada's first municipally-owned electric street railway. Both cities spurned Bell Telephone Company of Canada to establish their own municipally-owned telephone systems in 1902; the boom came to an end in 1913–1914, aggravated by the outbreak of the First World War. A war-time economy emerged with the making of munitions and shipbuilding. Men from the cities joined the 52nd, 94th, 141st Battalions of the Canadian Expeditionary Force. Railway employment was hurt when the federal government took over the National Transcontinental Railway and Lake Superior Division from the Grand Trunk in 1915, the Canadian Northern Railway in 1918; these were amalgamated with other government-owned railways in 1923 to form the Canadian National Railways. The CNR closed many of the Canadian Northern Railway facilities in Port Arthur, it opened the Neebing yards in Neebing Township in 1922. By 1929, the population of the two cities had recovered to pre-war levels; the forest products industry has played an important role in the Thunder Bay economy from the 1870s.

In the 1880s, Herman Finger established the Pigeon River Lumber Company in the area, built the Gunflint and Lake Superior Railroad, but he dissolved the lumber company and moved his operations to The Pas b

Franz-Benno Delonge was a designer of German-style board games. He has been nominated for multiple best game awards, including Spiel des Jahres and International Gamers Awards. TransAmerica won the Mensa best mind game award for 2003, he died of cancer on September 2, 2007. Delonge started boardgaming as a child spending extended periods of time with his grandmother and her sisters; these three widows enjoyed all kinds of card and board games, the most popular card game in Bavaria was for four players. Although quite hard, they made sure. While enjoying the success of TransAmerica, he would prefer to play other games he designed, like Dos Rios, Hellas or Big City, he considered his best work to have been Manila. TransAmerica was the game he thought was easiest for him to design, found that simple rules can have unexpected consequences. Dos Rios, on the other hand, he felt was the hardest game to work to completion, which took around 5 years to improve from basic design to publishable product. Big City is a game with a modular board, each board section representing a neighbourhood of a new and growing city.

Players draw cards representing development lots on those neighbourhoods, turn the cards in to build residences and other special buildings. If a building is larger than a single space multiple cards must be turned in, representing the adjacent lots; some buildings have restrictions on where they can be placed, points are scored based on the size and type of building, with bonuses for location, the adjacent buildings. Players have an opportunity to build a streetcar line, which provides bonus points for buildings. TransAmerica, was Delonge's greatest success, won a Mensa Best Mind Game award. Players have to build track to connect their five randomly and secretly assigned cities. Delonge attributed much of its success to the simplicity of the rules. Fjords TransEuropa Hellas Zahltag Goldbräu Dos Rios Nah Dran! Manila Kunstmarkt Zanzibar Container Franz-Benno Delonge Interview by Dave Shapiro, The Game Journal. Luding Entry for Franz-Benno Delonge. Franz-Benno Delonge at BoardGameGeek

The following is a list of notable human geographers. Alexander von Humboldt, one of the founders of modern geography, he traveled extensively and pioneered empirical research methods that would develop into biogeography and physical geography but anticipated population geography and economic geography. Humboldt University of Berlin is named after his brother Wilhelm von Humboldt. Carl Ritter, considered to be one of the founders of modern geography and first chair in geography at the Humboldt University of Berlin noted for his use of organic analogy in his works. Xavier Hommaire de Hell, research in Turkey, southern Russia and Persia Élisée Reclus, known for his monumental 19 volume The Earth and Its Inhabitants, he coined the term social geography and his thinking anticipated the social ecology and animal rights movements, where he advocated anarchism and veganism as part of an ethical life. Peter Kropotkin, one of the first radical geographers, he was a proponent of anarchism and notable for his introduction of the concept of mutual aid.

Friedrich Ratzel, environmental determinist, invented the term Lebensraum Paul Vidal de la Blache, founder of the French School of geopolitics and possibilism. Sir Halford John Mackinder, author of The Geographical Pivot of History, co-founder of the London School of Economics, along with the Geographical Association. Jovan Cvijić, a Serbian geographer and a world-renowned scientist, he started his scientific career as a geographer and geologist, continued his activity as an anthropogeographer and sociologist. Carl O. Sauer, critic of environmental determinism and proponent of cultural ecology. Walter Christaller, economic geographer and developer of the central place theory. Richard Hartshorne, scholar of the history and philosophy of geography. Torsten Hägerstrand, key figure in the quantitative revolution and regional science, developer of time geography and indirect contributor to aspects of critical geography. Milton Santos winner of the Vautrin Lud Prize in 1994, one of the most important geographers in South America.

Waldo R. Tobler, developer of the First law of geography. Gamal Hamdan, an Egyptian thinker and professor of geography. Best known for The Character of Egypt, Studies of the Arab World, The Contemporary Islamic World Geography, which form a trilogy on Egypt's natural, economic and cultural character and its position in the world. Yi-Fu Tuan Professor Emeritus at University of Wisconsin–Madison, key figure behind the development of humanist and phenomenological geography and the most prominent Chinese-American geographer. Recipient of the Vautrin Lud Prize in 2012. David Harvey, world's most cited academic geographer and winner of the Lauréat Prix International de Géographie Vautrin Lud noted for his work in critical geography and critique of global capitalism. Evelyn Stokes. Professor of geography at the University of Waikato in New Zealand. Known for recognizing inequality with marginalised groups including women and Māori using geography. Allen J. Scott, winner of Vautrin Lud Prize in 2003 and the Anders Retzius Gold medal 2009.

Edward Soja, noted for his work on regional development and governance, along with coining the terms synekism and postmetropolis. Doreen Massey, key scholar in the space and places of globalization and its pluralities, winner of the Vautrin Lud Prize. Denis Cosgrove, Alexander von Humboldt Professor of geography at UCLA in California. Specialized in cultural geography and landscapes. Michael Watts, Class of 1963 Professor of Geography and Development Studies, University of California, Berkeley Nigel Thrift, developer of non-representational theory. Derek Gregory, famous for writing on the Israeli, U. S. and UK actions in the Middle East after 9/11, influenced by Edward Said and has contributed work on imagined geographies. Cindi Katz, who writes on social reproduction and the production of space. Writing on children's geographies and nature, everyday life and security. Gillian Rose, most famous for her critique: Feminism & Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge, one of the first moves towards a development of feminist geography.

Nikolai Petrusevich, credited with discovering the Sarygamysh Depression and other geography accomplishments in Afghanistan and scientist for the Russian Army, liberated slaves in Ottoman villages