We are all familiar with this last name and the famous extrapolation method that takes his name used to improve the rate of convergence of a sequence. What we didn’t study and probably never will are his other important contributions to humanity, which I consider worth to talk about for common knowledge.

Lewis Fry Richardson wasn’t the typical scientist; besides being a mathematician, physicist and meteorologist, he was also a psychologist and a pacifist who made invaluable contributions to each of these fields. Unfortunately, the lack of fast computers in the beginning of the 20th century caused that most of his theories weren’t taken seriously at that time; it was until the 1950-1960 that everyone started noticing his great ideas.

 “The root of the matter is that the greatest stimulus of scientific discovery are its practical applications.” – Richardson (1908).  After his 1910 paper called “The approximate solution by finite differences of physical problems involving differential equations”, he realized that this method could have many practical applications; one of them was weather prediction. He attempted to forecast the weather in a single day, but this forecast failed dramatically, predicting a huge rise in pressure over 6 hrs when the pressure actually stayed stable. However, it was later discovered that this failure was the result of not applying smoothing techniques to the data. If these techniques are applied, Richardson’s forecast turns out to be really accurate. This was an extraordinary accomplishment considering the calculations were done by hand, and while Richardson was serving as the driver of a Quaker ambulance unit in northern France. His book “Weather prediction by numerical processes” was publish in 1922. Richardson was also an active pacifist. Influenced by WW I, where he lost members of his family, he turned his research to the causes of war. In 1919, he published by his own his 1^st paper in the subject: “Mathematical Psychology of war”. He analyzed war using mainly differential equations and probability. Considering the armament of two nations, Richardson created a system of equations where “the rate of a nation’s armament build-up is directly proportional to the amount of arms its rival has and also to the grievances felt toward the rival, and negatively proportional to the amount of arms it already has itself”. 

In 1926 he abandoned meteorology for psychology. By 1929 he had already published the first of a series of papers on the quantitative estimation of perception, including brightness, color, loudness, and pain. These papers are nowadays widely used.

In 1930 he turned his study of war to its statistics. He was looking to see whether there is any statistical connection between war, riot and murder. He started accumulating data from different sources ranging from small-scale conflicts to world wars. This data showed that “the number of quarrels (after 1800) decreased in frequency directly in relation to their magnitude, defined as the logarithm of the numbers killed on all sides of the quarrel” and also showed that  “the average time between wars of different magnitudes was random but did have a particular statistical distribution”. In 1980, in the popular science book Cosmos, Professor Carl Sagan of Cornell University extrapolated from Richardson’s result to predict that “it will probably be about 1000 years before there is a conflict so large (magnitude 10) that the entire world population (10,000 million) will be annihilated”.

In 1997, the Interdisciplinary Working Group (IWG) on Nonlinear Processes in Geophysics established the Lewis Fry Richardson Medal, in recognition of the scientific achievement of Lewis Fry Richardson. It is reserved for scientists for their exceptional contributions to nonlinear geophysics in general. 

I hope this brief account of Lewis Fry Richardson’s life and work influences in some way the career and approach of future scientists, as I consider that an individual, as Richardson, who uses his abilities and skills to help humanity  are worthy of admiration, attention and study.

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Fry_Richardson

http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/35739

http://www.copernicus.org/EGU/egs/award6s.htm

http://www.cpom.org/people/jcrh/AnnRevFluMech(30)LFR.pdf