Аннотация:Purpose of Review
In this article, I consider how ideas about the role of mathematics in the formation of landscape studies as those lying between inexact (descriptive) and exact (physical) sciences have changed historically. In his little-known work of 1888, V. V. Dokuchaev answered the question of what was required for a descriptive science, like soil science, to turn into an exact discipline. It took more than a hundred years for Soviet and Russian landscape studies, established in the late 1940s, to move on in the direction of exact sciences owing to informatization.