Summary. The original shipping strategy of FedEx was to fly all packages to a hub during
the afternoon and evening, sort them there, and then fly them to their destinations over night
for delivery the next day. This leads to interesting mathematical questions: Given a population
represented by points in Euclidean space or on a sphere, what is the location of the hub that
minimizes the total distance to all the points? Is such a point unique? After answering these
questions, we use census data from 2000 to examine how close the FedEx hub in Memphis is
to the proper hub of the U.S. population.