Richardson, Lewis Fry

Lewis Fry Richardson, (born Oct. 11, 1881, Newcastle upon Tyne, Northumberland, Eng.—died Sept. 30, 1953, Kilmun, Argyll, Scot.), British physicist and psychologist who was the first to apply mathematical techniques to predict the weather accurately.

Richardson made major contributions to methods of solving certain types of problems in physics, and from 1913 to 1922 he applied his ideas to meteorology. His work, published in Weather Prediction by Numerical Process (1922), was not entirely successful at first. The main drawback to his mathematical technique for systematically forecasting the weather was the time necessary to produce such a forecast. It generally took him three months to predict the weather for the next 24 hours. With the advent of electronic computers after World War II, his method of weather prediction, somewhat altered and improved, became practical. The Richardson number, a fundamental quantity involving the gradients (change over a distance) of temperature and wind velocity, is named after him.

Richardson served as chairman of the physics department at Westminster Training College, London, from 1920 to 1929, and principal of the Paisley College of Technology, Paisley, Renfrewshire, from 1929 to 1940. An ardent pacifist, he attempted to use mathematics in the study of the causes of war and published his studies in Generalized Foreign Politics (1939), Arms and Insecurity (1949), and Statistics of Deadly Quarrels (1950). He made contributions to the theory of calculus and the study of diffusion (the intermingling of molecules or other small particles by random thermal motion).