Centre of Flanders

During a conversation about new research projects, Wouter and I came to the subject of Monte Carlo simulations. 'I once used that to calculate the Centre of Flanders that is located in Opdorp', he told me. Refilling his coffee, I hoped to get the full story with all the details. 'We were given this assignment by Professor Van Der Waeteren during the Civil Engineering student programme in Leuven. He had already calculated it himself, because he also wanted to score in the press with this story ... And then, of course, you can't make it that students would put forward a wrong calculation. There were a few fun and difficult aspects to the calculation, such as the islands of Belgium in the Netherlands, known as Baarle-Hertog. I also investigated what the effect would be if the national border were recorded in much more detail. Does the center shift? For that I used a Monte Carlo simulation. You then get a point cloud of +/- 5-10m around the calculated center, as alternative centers of Flanders.

It was funny that the calculated center of Flanders was in the middle of a farmer's field and then the municipality of Opdorp wanted to buy that piece to place a monument there, that farmer did not want to know about any sales, let alone a monument in the middle of his field. As a result, the result of our calculation was adjusted somewhat. The monument was placed a few hundred meters away, at the corner of the field'.

'The idea of calculating the Centre of Flanders originated from the brain of Professor Van Der Waeteren when he heard on the radio that they wanted to erect a monument to Suske and Wiske and place it at the Centre of Flanders, but they didn't really know where that was. So that was fixed. There was no monument of Suske and Wiske, but a monument of a local artist'.

Pascal Brackman