(nm, missed something)
I ran this through a free GIS program and counted 4, all of which have been mentioned:
[ul]
[li]France (located in Spain)[/li][li]Israel (in Palestine… yeah, I know)[/li][li]Croatia (in Bosnia)[/li][li]Vietnam (in Laos)[/li][/ul]
You can see an image of the map here:
Sorry, can’t seem to get the actual map to upload. Buggy cloud service.
What I did:
[ol]
[li]Imported the countries as polygons[/li][li]Calculated the center-of-mass centroids for all countries[/li][li]Filtered out the ones that aren’t in their countries[/li][li]Filtered out the ones that aren’t in ANY country (in the water)[/li][/ol]
(Source: Natural Earth countries)
How did “metropolitan” come to mean “main contiguous part”?
I was going to ask if you’d also consider Scotland to be questionable with regards to the UK, since the above is also true to a lesser or greater extent in Scotland, but then I noticed that the OP only mentions “country” without any sovereignty caveats, so Scotland is definitely debatable with regards to the UK. Except that Great Britain and England are distinctly non-crescent shaped so are not candidates for this thread.
As far as I can tell, it goes back to the Greeks, where “metropolis” literally meant “mother city”. But cities & states were interchangeable, so it also effectively meant “mother country” in relation to a colony.
I think. This is what I can piece together from the various entries for metropolis, metropole, metropolitan, etc. in the OED.
I’m going to guess that the Federated States of Micronesia does. It consists of a lot of small islands over a large geographical area. That is 702 km[sup]2[/sup] of land distributed in 2,600,000 km[sup]2[/sup] of ocean. I’d be very surprised if it turned out the geographical centre was actually on an island.
Other nation of multiple Islands probably count, too. Maybe Hawaii, back when it was an independent kingdom.
The OP ruled out centers that aren’t on land. Without that restriction, pretty much all island nations consisting of more than one island would have centers not on land. But in most cases the center will lie within their territorial waters, that is, within their borders. Here’s a map of the territorial waters of Oceania. It looks like all centers will fall within a country’s territorial waters.
A more interesting case is when a center that is not on land falls within the territorial waters of another country. As I mentioned above, Malaysia seems to be such a case, with it’s center in Indonesian waters. I don’t know if there are others.
My mistake, it is equivalent to the usual convention. The OP asked for the point with the minimum mean-squared distance from all other points. The centroid is usually defined as the arithmetic mean of all the points. I thought these were different, but on further reflection, it is possible to prove that the two are equivalent. This works in any number of dimensions, so you can apply it on the sphere or in the plane. On a mountainous sphere of course, the centroids may be below (or above) ground.
Cool! Can you also do Somalia (including Somaliland and Puntland)?
The change from naming territories differently from their capital took place during the Middle Ages, partly because during that period quite a few “countries” had capitals that moved a lot (following the Court), rather than one place which stayed as the bureaucratic center regardless of where the monarch happened to be. The metropolitan territory is the one which contains the “metropolis” in the meaning of “capital city”, once these bureaucratic centers became fixed again.
False friend warning: this usage doesn’t exist in every language that has “metropolis” in its dictionary; neither in Spanish nor in Portuguese is the original territory called that (I don’t know about Dutch, Italian, Danish…).
what is a centroid?
A centroid is just the technical term for the center, as we’re using it here. There’s more than one point which can be called the “center” of a complicated shape, but the centroid is most often the most useful one. Basically, if you were to cut the shape out of plywood, the centroid is the point where it would balance.
You probably want to add “more than one island of significant size”. There are several nations consisting of one decent-sized island together with a bunch of flyspecks that hardly matter.