Abstract of my AAG 2012 Paper
In mathematics everything is algorithm and nothing is meaning; even when it doesn't look like that because we seem to be using words to talk about mathematical things.
Even these words are used to construct an algorithm. ---Ludwig Wittgenstein
...a proof of the existence of a magnitude can only be seen as completely rigorous if it contains a method by which the magnitude whose existence is being claimed can really be found. ---Leopold Kronecker
We look upon maps not only as stores of spatially ordered information, but also as a means for the graphical solution of certain problems for which the mathematics proves to be intractable. --William Warntz
In the early years of computer cartography new levels of abstraction entered into the field of geographical analysis through the algorithmic development of theorems from pure mathematics. In an attempt to answer previously intractable geographical questions, concepts from pure mathematics, like existence theorems, whose basic logical structure contains statements that confirm or deny the existence of particular sets of mathematical objects, were employed in various computer mapping schemes. The development of these programs injected high levels of topological and algebraic abstraction into geographical analysis and changed the basic ontology of geographic objects. Existence theorems, although they provide logical proof for whatever mathematical entity they are claiming existence for, do not however, necessarily provide a way to find or calculate those objects. In the field of pure mathematics existence theorems had long been objects of controversy from both a practical and philosophical perspective and their use sparked debates among many mathematicians. Mathematicians and philosophers, like Leopold Kronecker and Ludwig Wittgenstein, questioned the utility of a mathematical proof that provided no algorithmic way to find the mathematical object whose existence is claimed, while others such as David Hilbert and Richard Dedekind, saw no conceptual or philosophical difficulties with their use. This debate among the so-called constructivists, like Wittgenstein, who believed that in mathematics “everything is algorithm”, and the formalists like Hilbert, has left a large body of philosophical literature that has deeply analyzed the ontology of mathematical objects. 
In the fields of geography and cartography, these theorems entered into early computer systems through the construction of practical algorithms that calculated particular sets of objects useful in geographic analysis. Two important papers that can be seen as case studies in the use of constructivist forms of existence theorems in early computer cartography were published in the series Harvard Papers in Theoretical Geography by William Warntz and his associates at the Harvard Lab for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This series of papers developed algorithmic constructions of many existence theorems and two of the most interesting, because of the sheer complexity of the mathematics, the Borsuk-Ulam Theorem and the Ham Sandwich Theorem, were applied to real world geographic problems .
Besides using existence theorems, mathematical cartographers would also begin to re-conceptualize on a more general level questions about the use of pure mathematics and its role in defining the diagrammatic logic of maps. In an early lecture, later written as a discussion paper for the Michigan Inter-University Community of Mathematical Geographers, Warntz says that, "More than ever before geographers are using the tools of calculus, probability, topology, symbolic logic, the various algebras, geometries, for example, are being taken more literally than ever before." He elaborates on these comments by explaining to the reader that something as abstract and foreign to geography as Venn diagrams are being taken, "in a far more literal sense than they were originally intended and by substituting real space and attendent phenonema for ideal space and by insisting on the utiliza