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Lewis Fry Richardson (1881–1953)

Basic Information

  • Full name: Lewis Fry Richardson
  • Born: 11 October 1881, Newcastle upon Tyne, Northumberland, England
  • Died: 30 September 1953 (aged 71), Kilmun, Argyll and Bute, Scotland (died quietly in his sleep)
  • Nationality: British
  • Fields: Mathematics, physics, meteorology, psychology, peace studies

Family Background

Richardson was born into a prosperous Quaker family, the youngest of seven children.

  • Father: David Richardson (1835–1913), operated a successful tanning and leather-manufacturing business
  • Mother: Catherine Fry (1838–1919), from a corn merchant family
  • Wife: Dorothy Garnett (married 1909), daughter of mathematician and physicist William Garnett
  • Children: Unable to have biological children due to blood type incompatibility; adopted two sons and a daughter between 1920 and 1927
  • Notable relatives:
    • Nephew: Sir Ralph Richardson (acclaimed actor)
    • Great-nephew (through wife’s brother James Clerk Maxwell Garnett): Julian Hunt, director-general of the British Meteorological Office 1992–1997
    • Great-niece: Virginia Bottomley (politician, now Baroness Bottomley)

Education

  1. Newcastle Preparatory School – favourite subject was Euclidean geometry
  2. Bootham School, York (1894–1898) – Quaker boarding school; studied under J. Edmund Clark, a meteorology expert; developed active interest in natural history and science
  3. Durham College of Science, Newcastle (1898–1900) – two years studying mathematics, physics, chemistry, botany, zoology
  4. King’s College, Cambridge (1900–1903) – studied physics under J. J. Thomson; graduated with a First Class degree in the Natural Sciences Tripos
  5. University College London (external student) – obtained B.Sc. in psychology (1929)
  6. University of London – doctorate in mathematical psychology (awarded c. 1928, at age 47)

Career Timeline

Period Position Institution
1903–1904 Scientist National Physical Laboratory
1905–1906 Academic University College Aberystwyth
1906–1907 Chemist National Peat Industries
1907–1909 Scientist National Physical Laboratory
1909–1912 Laboratory Manager (physical/chemical) Sunbeam Lamp Company
1912–1913 Lecturer Manchester College of Technology
1913–1916 Superintendent Eskdalemuir Observatory, Meteorological Office
1916–1919 Volunteer ambulance driver Friends’ Ambulance Unit (attached to 16th French Infantry Division, France)
1919–1920 Meteorologist Meteorological Office, Benson, Oxfordshire
1920–1929 Head of Physics Department Westminster Training College
1929–1940 Principal Paisley Technical College (now University of the West of Scotland)
1940–1953 Retired Independent research at Kilmun, Scotland

Fellow of the Royal Society: Elected 1926

Major Scientific Contributions

1. Numerical Weather Prediction

Richardson was the first person to apply the method of finite differences to predict the weather mathematically. He developed the technique while solving differential equations for water flow in peat during his work at National Peat Industries, then applied it to the atmosphere.

The Wartime Forecast Attempt:

During WWI, while serving with the Friends’ Ambulance Unit, Richardson attempted a retroactive numerical forecast for 20 May 1910 (7 AM), calculating weather changes six hours forward by hand. He wrote: “My office was a heap of hay in a cold rest billet.” The calculations took over six weeks to produce a six-hour forecast for a single location.

His initial prediction failed dramatically, forecasting a 145 hPa pressure rise in six hours when actual pressure remained essentially static. However, later analysis (notably by Peter Lynch in the 1990s) showed that applying proper smoothing techniques to his initial data rendered his forecast essentially accurate. The wild pressure tendency arose from unbalanced initial conditions – precisely the problem Jule Charney would solve three decades later with quasi-geostrophic filtering.

The Lost Manuscript:

The manuscript of Weather Prediction by Numerical Process was lost during the Battle of Champagne in April 1917, only to be “fortuitously found, months later, under a pile of coal.” The book was finally published in 1922 by Cambridge University Press.

Key publication: Weather Prediction by Numerical Process (Cambridge University Press, 1922)

2. The Forecast Factory Vision

In his 1922 book, Richardson described his famous “forecast factory” – a theatrical vision of what parallel computation for weather prediction might look like:

“After so much hard reasoning, an interval of fantasy! Imagine a large hall like a theatre… The walls of this chamber are painted to form a map of the globe… A myriad computers are at work upon the weather of the part of the map where each sits, but each computer attends only to one equation or part of an equation. The work of each region is coordinated by an official of higher rank. Numerous little ‘night signs’ display the instantaneous values… From the floor of the pit a tall pillar rises to half the height of the hall. It carries a large pulpit on its top. In this sits the man in charge of the whole theatre; he is surrounded by several assistants and messengers. One of his duties is to maintain a uniform speed of progress in all parts of the globe. In this respect he is like the conductor of an orchestra in which the instruments are slide-rules and calculating machines.”

Richardson estimated that 64000 human “computers” would be needed to calculate weather forecasts in real time, each responsible for one small part of the globe.

3. Turbulence and the Richardson Number

Richardson made fundamental contributions to the understanding of atmospheric turbulence and eddy diffusion. The Richardson number (Ri), a dimensionless number expressing the ratio of buoyancy to shear forces, is named after him. He also developed the concept of Richardson extrapolation in numerical analysis.

His famous verse on turbulence (a parody of Jonathan Swift) appeared in his 1922 book:

“Big whirls have little whirls that feed on their velocity, and little whirls have lesser whirls and so on to viscosity – in the molecular sense.”

4. The Coastline Paradox and Fractals

While researching the relationship between border lengths and the probability of war, Richardson discovered that measured coastline length increases indefinitely as measurement units shrink – there is no true “final” length. He found, for example, the Spain-Portugal border variously quoted as 987 or 1214 km, and the Netherlands-Belgium border as 380 or 449 km.

Richardson identified a parameter (between 1 and 2) describing how observed complexity changes with measurement scale – a precursor to the concept of fractal dimension. Benoit Mandelbrot later cited this work in his 1967 paper “How Long Is the Coast of Britain?” and credited Richardson as a forerunner. This phenomenon became known as the Richardson effect.

5. Mathematics of War and Peace

Richardson spent much of his later career applying mathematical methods to the study of conflict:

  • Arms race equations: Developed differential equation models (now called the Richardson arms race model) positing that the rate of a nation’s armament buildup is directly proportional to the amount of arms its rival has and to grievances felt toward the rival, and inversely proportional to the amount of arms it already has. He noted: “The equations are merely a description of what people would do if they did not stop and think.”
  • Statistics of Deadly Quarrels: Analysed virtually every war from 1815–1950, categorizing conflicts using a logarithmic scale by battle deaths. He was the first to observe that war sizes follow a Pareto distribution and that international wars per year follow a Poisson distribution.
  • Border length and war: Originated the theory that war propensity between nations correlates with common border length.

Key publications:

  • “The Mathematical Psychology of War” (1919, privately printed; widely published 1935)
  • “Generalized Foreign Politics” (1939)
  • Arms and Insecurity (1949)
  • Statistics of Deadly Quarrels (1950/1960)

6. Acoustic Echolocation Patents

In April 1912 (shortly after the Titanic sinking), Richardson registered a patent for iceberg detection using acoustic echolocation in air. A month later, he patented acoustic underwater echolocation – six years before Langevin and Boyle developed sonar.

Quaker Pacifism and Conscience

Richardson’s Quaker beliefs shaped his entire career. Key consequences:

  1. Conscientious objector in WWI: Served with the Friends’ Ambulance Unit (1916–1919) rather than fight, which subsequently disqualified him from academic posts at many universities.

  2. Resignation from the Met Office (1920): When the Meteorological Office was amalgamated into the Air Ministry in 1920, Richardson resigned “on grounds of conscience.” He could not work for an organization under military control.

  3. Destruction of unpublished work: According to Thomas Korner, Richardson discovered that his meteorological work had potential value for chemical weapons designers. This caused him to abandon those research efforts and destroy unpublished findings relating to them.

  4. Belief in subordination of science to morals: He stated: “Science ought to be subordinate to morals.”

Personal Characteristics

E. Gold wrote in his 1954 Royal Society memoir: “Research for Richardson was the inevitable consequence of the tendency of his mental machine to run almost, but not quite, by itself.”

Gold also described Richardson as a somewhat distracted listener and poor driver, yet a man who showed “dignity of service” through performing menial tasks and maintained a “character of kindness and service” throughout his career.

Richardson produced approximately 30 papers on weather mathematics during his career, alongside his peace research and psychological work.

Awards and Honours

  • Fellow of the Royal Society (1926)
  • Lewis Fry Richardson Medal – awarded by the European Geosciences Union since 1997 for “exceptional contributions to nonlinear geophysics”
  • Richardson Institute at Lancaster University (established 1959) – conducts peace and conflict research in his tradition

Connections to Other NWP Pioneers

  • Vilhelm Bjerknes: Richardson’s 1922 work attempted to implement the programme Bjerknes outlined in his 1904 paper – using physical equations to predict the weather. Richardson cited Bjerknes’s primitive equations.
  • Jule Charney: Richardson’s dramatic failure was caused by unbalanced initial conditions. Charney’s quasi-geostrophic filtering (1948) was precisely the solution. Charney sent Richardson copies of the first ENIAC forecasts (1950); Richardson asked his wife to judge whether the forecasts matched the verifications. She replied that the forecast maps had it “on average, but only slightly.” Richardson wrote to Charney: “This, although not a great success of a popular sort is anyway an enormous scientific advance on the single, and quite wrong, result in which Richardson (1922) ended.”
  • Edward Lorenz: Richardson’s verse on turbulence (“big whirls have little whirls”) foreshadows the cascading scales that Lorenz’s chaos theory would later illuminate.

Legacy

Richardson’s work remained largely overlooked during his lifetime but gained posthumous recognition as foundational to:

  • Modern numerical weather prediction (every operational forecast centre in the world uses his finite difference methods)
  • Fractal geometry (via Mandelbrot’s use of his coastline work)
  • Peace and conflict studies (quantitative approaches to understanding war)

The Met Office celebrates Richardson’s 1922 book as the origin of scientific weather forecasting.

Sources

  • Gold, E. “Lewis Fry Richardson, 1881–1953.” Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 9 (1954): 216–235. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rsbm/article/9/1/216/34536/Lewis-Fry-Richardson-1881-1953 – Accessed: 2026-04-02
  • Vulpiani, A. “Lewis Fry Richardson: scientist, visionary and pacifist.” Lettera Matematica 2 (2014): 121–128. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40329-014-0063-z – Accessed: 2026-04-02
  • “Lewis Fry Richardson.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Fry_Richardson – Accessed: 2026-04-02
  • “Lewis Fry Richardson (1881–1953).” MacTutor History of Mathematics. https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Richardson/ – Accessed: 2026-04-02
  • “Lewis Fry Richardson.” Quakers in the World. https://www.quakersintheworld.org/quakers-in-action/375/Lewis-Fry-Richardson – Accessed: 2026-04-02
  • “Celebrating Lewis Fry Richardson and his legacy.” Met Office. https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/about-us/who-we-are/our-history/celebrating-100-years-of-scientific-forecasting – Accessed: 2026-04-02
  • Lynch, P. “Richardson’s Forecast Factory.” European Meteorological Society. https://www.emetsoc.org/resources/rff/ – Accessed: 2026-04-02
  • “Lewis Fry Richardson.” Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Lewis-Fry-Richardson – Accessed: 2026-04-02