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Lewis Fry Richardson

February 11, 2023

For other people named Lewis Richardson, see Lewis Richardson (disambiguation).

Lewis Fry Richardson, FRS[1] (11 October 1881 – 30 September 1953) was an English mathematician, physicist, meteorologist, psychologist, and pacifist who pioneered modern mathematical techniques of weather forecasting, and the application of similar techniques to studying the causes of wars and how to prevent them. He is also noted for his pioneering work concerning fractals and a method for solving a system of linear equations known as modified Richardson iteration.[2]

Lewis Fry Richardson
Lewis Fry Richardson D.Sc., FRS
Born(1881-10-11)11 October 1881
Newcastle upon Tyne, England, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland
Died30 September 1953(1953-09-30) (aged 71)
Kilmun, Argyll and Bute, Scotland, United Kingdom
CitizenshipUnited Kingdom
Alma materBootham School
Durham College of Science
King's College, Cambridge
Known forFractals
Conflict modelling
Richardson extrapolation
AwardsFellow of the Royal Society[1]
Scientific career
Fieldsmathematician
physicist
meteorologist
psychologist
InstitutionsNational Physical Laboratory
National Peat Industries
University College Aberystwyth
Meteorological Office
Paisley Technical College
InfluencesKarl Pearson
G. F. C. Searle
J. J. Thomson
InfluencedBenoit Mandelbrot

Early life

Lewis Fry Richardson was the youngest of seven children born to Catherine Fry (1838–1919) and David Richardson (1835–1913). They were a prosperous Quaker family, David Richardson operating a successful tanning and leather-manufacturing business.[3]

At age 12 he was sent to a Quaker boarding school, Bootham School[4][5] in York, where he received an education in science, which stimulated an active interest in natural history. In 1898 he went on to Durham College of Science (a college of Durham University) where he took courses in mathematical physics, chemistry, botany, and zoology. He proceeded in 1900 to King's College, Cambridge, where he was taught physics in the natural sciences tripos by (among others) J. J. Thomson and graduated with a first-class degree in 1903.[6] At age 47 he received a doctorate in mathematical psychology from the University of London.[7]

Career

Richardson's working life represented his eclectic interests:[8]

In 1926, he was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society[1][9]

Pacifism

Richardson's Quaker beliefs entailed an ardent pacifism that exempted him from military service during World War I as a conscientious objector, though this subsequently disqualified him from having any academic post. Richardson worked from 1916 to 1919 for the Friends' Ambulance Unit attached to the 16th French Infantry Division. After the war, he rejoined the Meteorological Office but was compelled to resign on grounds of conscience when it was amalgamated into the Air Ministry in 1920. He subsequently pursued a career on the fringes of the academic world before retiring in 1940 to research his own ideas. His pacifism had direct consequences on his research interests. According to Thomas Körner,[10] the discovery that his meteorological work was of value to chemical weapons designers caused him to abandon all his efforts in this field, and destroy findings that he had yet to publish.

Weather forecasting

Richardson's interest in meteorology led him to propose a scheme for weather forecasting by solution of differential equations, the method used nowadays, though when he published Weather Prediction by Numerical Process in 1922, suitable fast computing was unavailable. He described his ideas thus:

"After so much hard reasoning, may one play with a fantasy? Imagine a large hall like a theatre, except that the circles and galleries go right round through the space usually occupied by the stage. The walls of this chamber are painted to form a map of the globe. The ceiling represents the north polar regions, England is in the gallery, the tropics in the upper circle, Australia on the dress circle and the Antarctic in the pit.

A myriad computers [people who compute] 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 so that neighbouring computers can read them. Each number is thus displayed in three adjacent zones so as to maintain communication to the North and South on the map.

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. But instead of waving a baton he turns a beam of rosy light upon any region that is running ahead of the rest, and a beam of blue light upon those who are behindhand.

Four senior clerks in the central pulpit are collecting the future weather as fast as it is being computed, and despatching it by pneumatic carrier to a quiet room. There it will be coded and telephoned to the radio transmitting station. Messengers carry piles of used computing forms down to a storehouse in the cellar.

In a neighbouring building there is a research department, where they invent improvements. But there is much experimenting on a small scale before any change is made in the complex routine of the computing theatre. In a basement an enthusiast is observing eddies in the liquid lining of a huge spinning bowl, but so far the arithmetic proves the better way. In another building are all the usual financial, correspondence and administrative offices. Outside are playing fields, houses, mountains and lakes, for it was thought that those who compute the weather should breathe of it freely." (Richardson 1922)

When news of the first weather forecast by the first modern computer, ENIAC, was received by Richardson in 1950, he responded that the results were an "enormous scientific advance." The first calculations for a 24-hour forecast took ENIAC nearly 24 hours to produce.[11]

He was also interested in atmospheric turbulence and performed many terrestrial experiments. The Richardson number, a dimensionless parameter of the theory of turbulence is named for him. He famously summarised turbulence in rhyming verse in Weather Prediction by Numerical Process (p 66):[12]

Big whirls have little whirls that feed on their velocity,

and little whirls have lesser whirls and so on to viscosity.

[A play on two lines of Augustus De Morgan's poem Siphonaptera, "Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em, / And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum." (A Budget of Paradoxes, 1915). De Morgan's lines themselves reword two lines of Jonathan Swift's satirical poem "On Poetry: A Rapsody" of 1733.]

Richardson's attempt at numerical forecast

One of Richardson's most celebrated achievements is his retroactive attempt to forecast the weather during a single day—20 May 1910—by direct computation. At the time, meteorologists performed forecasts principally by looking for similar weather patterns from records, and then extrapolating forward. Richardson attempted to use a mathematical model of the principal features of the atmosphere, and use data taken at a specific time (7 AM) to calculate the weather six hours later ab initio. As meteorologist Peter Lynch makes clear,[13] Richardson's forecast failed dramatically, predicting a huge 145 hectopascals (4.3 inHg) rise in pressure over six hours when the pressure actually was more or less static. However, detailed analysis by Lynch has shown that the cause was a failure to apply smoothing techniques to the data, which rule out unphysical surges in pressure. When these are applied, Richardson's forecast is revealed to be essentially accurate—a remarkable achievement considering the calculations were done by hand, and while Richardson was serving with the Quaker ambulance unit in northern France.

Mathematical analysis of war

Richardson also applied his mathematical skills in the service of his pacifist principles, in particular in understanding the basis of international conflict. For this reason, he is now considered the initiator, or co-initiator (with Quincy Wright and Pitirim Sorokin as well as others such as Kenneth Boulding, Anatol Rapaport and Adam Curle), of the scientific analysis of conflict—an interdisciplinary topic of quantitative and mathematical social science dedicated to systematic investigation of the causes of war and conditions of peace. As he had done with weather, he analysed war using mainly differential equations and probability theory. Considering the armament of two nations, Richardson posited an idealised system of equations whereby 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. Solution of this system of equations allows insightful conclusions to be made regarding the nature, and the stability or instability, of various hypothetical conditions which might obtain between nations.

He also originated the theory that the propensity for war between two nations was a function of the length of their common border. And in Arms and Insecurity (1949), and Statistics of Deadly Quarrels (1960), he sought to analyse the causes of war statistically. Factors he assessed included economics, language, and religion. In the preface of the latter, he wrote: "There is in the world a great deal of brilliant, witty political discussion which leads to no settled convictions. My aim has been different: namely to examine a few notions by quantitative techniques in the hope of reaching a reliable answer."

In Statistics of Deadly Quarrels Richardson presented data on virtually every war from 1815 to 1945. As a result, he hypothesized a base 10 logarithmic scale for conflicts. In other words, there are many more small fights, in which only a few people die, than large ones that kill many. While no conflict's size can be predicted beforehand—indeed, it is impossible to give an upper limit to the series—overall they do form a Poisson distribution.[14] On a smaller scale he showed the same pattern for gang murders in Chicago and Shanghai. Others have noted that similar statistical patterns occur frequently, whether planned (lotteries, with many more small payoffs than large wins), or by natural organisation (there are more small towns with grocery stores than big cities with superstores).

Research on the length of coastlines and borders

Main article: Coastline paradox

Richardson decided to search for a relation between the probability of two countries going to war and the length of their common border. However, while collecting data, he found that there was considerable variation in the various published lengths of international borders. For example, that between Spain and Portugal was variously quoted as 987 or 1214 km, and that between the Netherlands and Belgium as 380 or 449 km.[15]

The reason for these inconsistencies is the "coastline paradox". Suppose the coast of Britain is measured using a 200 km ruler, specifying that both ends of the ruler must touch the coast. Now cut the ruler in half and repeat the measurement, then repeat:

     

The smaller the ruler, the longer the resulting coastline. It might be supposed that these values would converge to a finite number representing the true length of the coastline. However, Richardson demonstrated that this is not the case: the measured length of coastlines, and other natural features, increases without limit as the unit of measurement is made smaller.[16] This is known nowadays as the Richardson effect.[17]

At the time, Richardson's research was ignored by the scientific community. Today, it is considered an element of the beginning of the modern study of fractals. Richardson's research was quoted by mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot in his 1967 paper How Long Is the Coast of Britain? Richardson identified a value (between 1 and 2) that would describe the changes (with increasing measurement detail) in observed complexity for a particular coastline; this value served as a model for the concept of fractal dimension.[18]

Patents for detection of icebergs

In April 1912, soon after the loss of the ship Titanic, Richardson registered a patent for iceberg detection using acoustic echolocation in air. A month later he registered a similar patent for acoustic echolocation in water, anticipating the invention of sonar by Paul Langevin and Robert Boyle 6 years later.[19]

In popular culture

A fictional version of Richardson, named Wallace Ryman, plays a pivotal role in Giles Foden's novel Turbulence.[20]

Richardson is mentioned in John Brunner's work, Stand on Zanzibar where Statistics of Deadly Quarrels is used as an argument that wars are inevitable.

Richardson's work is also mentioned in Poul Anderson's speculative fiction novelette, Kings Who Die.

Richardson is mentioned in Charlie Kaufman's 2020 novel Antkind.

Richardson's famous quote, "Big whirls have little whirls that feed on their velocity; little whirls have lesser whirls & so on to viscosity" is mentioned in the song "Dots & Lines" written and performed by lyricist/rapper Lupe Fiasco.

Personal life

In 1909 he married Dorothy Garnett (1885–1956), daughter of the mathematician and physicist William Garnett.[21] They were unable to have children due to an incompatibility of blood types, but they adopted two sons and a daughter between 1920 and 1927.[22]

Richardson's nephew Ralph Richardson became a noted actor. His great-nephew (through his wife Dorothy's eldest brother, (James Clerk) Maxwell Garnett, C.B.E.), Julian Hunt, went on to become a meteorologist and director general and chief executive of the British Meteorological Office from 1992 to 1997.[23] A great-niece – of the same line of descent – is the former politician Virginia Bottomley, now Baroness Bottomley.[24][25]

Legacy

Since 1997, the Lewis Fry Richardson Medal has been awarded by the European Geosciences Union for "exceptional contributions to nonlinear geophysics in general" (by EGS until 2003[26] and by EGU since 2004).[27]

Winners have been:

Since 1959, there has been a Peace Studies centre at Lancaster University named the Richardson Institute which carries out interdisciplinary research on peace and conflict in the spirit of Lewis Fry Richardson.[29]

See also

Notes

  1. ^ a b c Gold, E. (1954). "Lewis Fry Richardson. 1881-1953". Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society. 9 (1): 216–235. doi:10.1098/rsbm.1954.0015. JSTOR 769208. S2CID 191485345.
  2. ^ O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Lewis Fry Richardson", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews
  3. ^ Hunt, p. xiv
  4. ^ Bootham School Register. York, England: BOSA. 2011.
  5. ^ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography[permanent dead link]
  6. ^ Hunt, p. xv
  7. ^ (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 5 May 2016. Retrieved 30 January 2019.
  8. ^ Ashford 1985, Ch 3–7
  9. ^ "Royal Society election citation EC/1926/21". The Royal Society. 1926. Archived from the original on 13 January 2013. Retrieved 21 January 2008.
  10. ^ Körner, T.W. (1996). "A Quaker mathematician" and "Richardson on war", Ch 8 and 9 in The Pleasures of Counting (Cambridge U.P.)
  11. ^ Peter Lynch (2008). (PDF). Journal of Computational Physics. University of Miami. 227 (7): 3436. Bibcode:2008JCoPh.227.3431L. doi:10.1016/j.jcp.2007.02.034. Archived from the original (PDF) on 8 July 2010. Retrieved 23 November 2010.
  12. ^ Richardson, Lewis Fry (1922). Weather Prediction by Numerical Processes. Boston: Cambridge University Press. p. 66. ISBN 9780511618291. Retrieved 23 February 2019.
  13. ^ Lynch, P. (2006) The Emergence of Numerical Weather Prediction (Cambridge U.P.)
  14. ^ Hayes, Brian (2002). "Computing Science: Statistics of Deadly Quarrels". American Scientist. 90 (1): 10–15. doi:10.1511/2002.13.3269. ISSN 0003-0996. JSTOR 27857587.
  15. ^ Lewis F. Richardson (1961). "The problem of contiguity: An appendix to Statistics of Deadly Quarrels". General Systems: Yearbook of the Society for the Advancement of General Systems Theory. Ann Arbor, Mich.: The Society, [1956–: Society for General Systems Research. 6 (139): 139–187. ISSN 0072-0798. OCLC 1429672. In the previous section integrals were taken around simple geometrical figures, as a preliminary to taking them around frontiers shown on political maps. An embarrassing doubt arose as to whether actual frontiers were so intricate as to invalidate that otherwise promising theory. A special investigation was made to settle this question. Some strange features came to notice; nevertheless an over-all general correction was found possible. The results will now be reported. ... As an explanation of how chance can arise in a world which he regarded as strictly deterministic, Heri Poincare* (no date) drew attention to insignificant causes which produced very noticeable effects. Sea coasts provide an apt illustration.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: location (link)
  16. ^ Fractals and the Fractal Dimension (Vanderbilt University website, accessed 30 January 2008) 13 May 2008 at the Wayback Machine
  17. ^ "The Richardson Effect". www.futilitycloset.com. 2 December 2013.
  18. ^ P. G. Drazin, "Fractals"; Collected Papers of Lewis Fry Richardson, Volume 1; Cambridge University Press, 1993; p. 45.
  19. ^ Michael A. Ainslie Principles of Sonar Performance Modelling, Springer, 2010 ISBN 3-540-87661-8, page 10
  20. ^ Foden
  21. ^ William Garnett (1850–1932) – Brief biography on the British Society for the History of Mathematics website (accessed 21 January 2008)
  22. ^ Ashford (2004)
  23. ^ "Lewis Fry Richardson's weather forecasts changed the world. But could". Independent.co.uk. 19 August 2014. Archived from the original on 14 June 2022.
  24. ^ "Obituary: John Garnett". Independent.co.uk. 23 October 2011. Archived from the original on 14 June 2022.
  25. ^ . Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/33333. ISBN 978-0-19-861412-8. Archived from the original on 30 April 2018. Retrieved 29 April 2018. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  26. ^ "EGS - Lewis Fry Richardson Medal".
  27. ^ "Lewis Fry Richardson Medal".
  28. ^ Text of lecture "From little whorls to the global atmosphere" given by 2007 prizewinner
  29. ^ "Home".

References

  • Wilkinson, David. Deadly Quarrels: Lewis F. Richardson and the Statistical Study of War (University of California Press, 2018) online review
  • Ashford, Oliver M. (1985). Prophet or Professor?: Life and Work of Lewis Fry Richardson. Bristol: Adam Hilger. ISBN 978-0-85274-774-2. 320pp
  • Ashford, Oliver M. (2004). "Richardson, Lewis Fry (1881–1953)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/35739. Retrieved 19 January 2008. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  • P.A. Davidson, Y. Kaneda, K. Moffatt, and K.R. Sreenivasan (eds, 2011). A Voyage Through Turbulence, chapter 5, pp 187–208, Cambridge University Press ISBN 978-0-521-19868-4
  • Hunt, J.C.R. (1998). (PDF). Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics. 30 (1): xiii–xxxvi. Bibcode:1998AnRFM..30D..13H. doi:10.1146/annurev.fluid.30.1.0. Archived from the original (PDF) on 27 February 2008. Retrieved 19 January 2008.
  • Körner, T. W. (1996). The Pleasures of Counting. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-56823-4.544pp "A Quaker mathematician" (Ch 8) and "Richardson on war" (Ch 9)
  • Lynch, Peter (June 2004). "Richardson's forecast: What went wrong?" (PDF). National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Retrieved 19 April 2007.
  • Lynch, Peter (2006). The Emergence of Numerical Weather Prediction: Richardson's Dream. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-85729-1. 290pp
  • Richardson, L.F. (1939). "Generalized foreign politics". The British Journal of Psychology, monograph supplement No. 23.
  • Richardson, L.F. (1960). Statistics of deadly quarrels. Pacific Grove, CA: Boxwood Press.
  • Richardson, L.F. (1993). Ashford, Oliver M; Charnock H; Drazin, P G; Hunt, J C R; Smoker, P; Sutherland, Ian (eds.). The Collected Papers of Lewis Fry Richardson, Volume 1: Meteorology and numerical analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-38297-7.1030pp; Volume 2: Quantitative psychology and studies of conflict. ISBN 978-0-521-38298-4, 778pp
  • Richardson, L.F. (1910). "The approximate arithmetical solution by finite differences of physical problems involving differential equations, with an application to the stresses in a masonry dam". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A. 210 (459–470): 307–357. Bibcode:1911RSPTA.210..307R. doi:10.1098/rsta.1911.0009.
  • Foden, Giles (2009). Turbulence. London: faber and faber. ISBN 978-0-571-20522-6. 353pp
  • Angeletti Ferdinando (2021) Storicismo matematico e pacifismo scientifico: due esempi di determinismo storico della metà del XX secolo in Iconografie europee di Walter Montanari e Shirin Zakeri (a cura di), Roma, Nuova Cultura ISBN 978-8-833-65368-6;

External links

February 11, 2023
lewis, richardson, other, people, named, lewis, richardson, lewis, richardson, disambiguation, october, 1881, september, 1953, english, mathematician, physicist, meteorologist, psychologist, pacifist, pioneered, modern, mathematical, techniques, weather, forec. For other people named Lewis Richardson see Lewis Richardson disambiguation Lewis Fry Richardson FRS 1 11 October 1881 30 September 1953 was an English mathematician physicist meteorologist psychologist and pacifist who pioneered modern mathematical techniques of weather forecasting and the application of similar techniques to studying the causes of wars and how to prevent them He is also noted for his pioneering work concerning fractals and a method for solving a system of linear equations known as modified Richardson iteration 2 Lewis Fry RichardsonLewis Fry Richardson D Sc FRSBorn 1881 10 11 11 October 1881Newcastle upon Tyne England United Kingdom of Great Britain and IrelandDied30 September 1953 1953 09 30 aged 71 Kilmun Argyll and Bute Scotland United KingdomCitizenshipUnited KingdomAlma materBootham School Durham College of Science King s College CambridgeKnown forFractals Conflict modelling Richardson extrapolationAwardsFellow of the Royal Society 1 Scientific careerFieldsmathematician physicist meteorologist psychologistInstitutionsNational Physical Laboratory National Peat Industries University College Aberystwyth Meteorological Office Paisley Technical CollegeInfluencesKarl Pearson G F C SearleJ J ThomsonInfluencedBenoit Mandelbrot Contents 1 Early life 2 Career 3 Pacifism 4 Weather forecasting 4 1 Richardson s attempt at numerical forecast 5 Mathematical analysis of war 6 Research on the length of coastlines and borders 7 Patents for detection of icebergs 8 In popular culture 9 Personal life 10 Legacy 11 See also 12 Notes 13 References 14 External linksEarly life EditLewis Fry Richardson was the youngest of seven children born to Catherine Fry 1838 1919 and David Richardson 1835 1913 They were a prosperous Quaker family David Richardson operating a successful tanning and leather manufacturing business 3 At age 12 he was sent to a Quaker boarding school Bootham School 4 5 in York where he received an education in science which stimulated an active interest in natural history In 1898 he went on to Durham College of Science a college of Durham University where he took courses in mathematical physics chemistry botany and zoology He proceeded in 1900 to King s College Cambridge where he was taught physics in the natural sciences tripos by among others J J Thomson and graduated with a first class degree in 1903 6 At age 47 he received a doctorate in mathematical psychology from the University of London 7 Career EditRichardson s working life represented his eclectic interests 8 National Physical Laboratory 1903 1904 University College Aberystwyth 1905 1906 Chemist National Peat Industries 1906 1907 National Physical Laboratory 1907 1909 Manager of the physical and chemical laboratory Sunbeam Lamp Company 1909 1912 Manchester College of Technology 1912 1913 Meteorological Office as superintendent of Eskdalemuir Observatory 1913 1916 Friends Ambulance Unit in France 1916 1919 Meteorological Office at Benson Oxfordshire 1919 1920 Head of the Physics Department at Westminster Training College 1920 1929 Principal Paisley Technical College now part of the University of the West of Scotland 1929 1940 In 1926 he was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society 1 9 Pacifism EditRichardson s Quaker beliefs entailed an ardent pacifism that exempted him from military service during World War I as a conscientious objector though this subsequently disqualified him from having any academic post Richardson worked from 1916 to 1919 for the Friends Ambulance Unit attached to the 16th French Infantry Division After the war he rejoined the Meteorological Office but was compelled to resign on grounds of conscience when it was amalgamated into the Air Ministry in 1920 He subsequently pursued a career on the fringes of the academic world before retiring in 1940 to research his own ideas His pacifism had direct consequences on his research interests According to Thomas Korner 10 the discovery that his meteorological work was of value to chemical weapons designers caused him to abandon all his efforts in this field and destroy findings that he had yet to publish Weather forecasting EditRichardson s interest in meteorology led him to propose a scheme for weather forecasting by solution of differential equations the method used nowadays though when he published Weather Prediction by Numerical Process in 1922 suitable fast computing was unavailable He described his ideas thus After so much hard reasoning may one play with a fantasy Imagine a large hall like a theatre except that the circles and galleries go right round through the space usually occupied by the stage The walls of this chamber are painted to form a map of the globe The ceiling represents the north polar regions England is in the gallery the tropics in the upper circle Australia on the dress circle and the Antarctic in the pit A myriad computers people who compute 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 so that neighbouring computers can read them Each number is thus displayed in three adjacent zones so as to maintain communication to the North and South on the map 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 But instead of waving a baton he turns a beam of rosy light upon any region that is running ahead of the rest and a beam of blue light upon those who are behindhand Four senior clerks in the central pulpit are collecting the future weather as fast as it is being computed and despatching it by pneumatic carrier to a quiet room There it will be coded and telephoned to the radio transmitting station Messengers carry piles of used computing forms down to a storehouse in the cellar In a neighbouring building there is a research department where they invent improvements But there is much experimenting on a small scale before any change is made in the complex routine of the computing theatre In a basement an enthusiast is observing eddies in the liquid lining of a huge spinning bowl but so far the arithmetic proves the better way In another building are all the usual financial correspondence and administrative offices Outside are playing fields houses mountains and lakes for it was thought that those who compute the weather should breathe of it freely Richardson 1922 When news of the first weather forecast by the first modern computer ENIAC was received by Richardson in 1950 he responded that the results were an enormous scientific advance The first calculations for a 24 hour forecast took ENIAC nearly 24 hours to produce 11 He was also interested in atmospheric turbulence and performed many terrestrial experiments The Richardson number a dimensionless parameter of the theory of turbulence is named for him He famously summarised turbulence in rhyming verse in Weather Prediction by Numerical Process p 66 12 Big whirls have little whirls that feed on their velocity and little whirls have lesser whirls and so on to viscosity A play on two lines of Augustus De Morgan s poem Siphonaptera Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite em And little fleas have lesser fleas and so ad infinitum A Budget of Paradoxes 1915 De Morgan s lines themselves reword two lines of Jonathan Swift s satirical poem On Poetry A Rapsody of 1733 Richardson s attempt at numerical forecast Edit One of Richardson s most celebrated achievements is his retroactive attempt to forecast the weather during a single day 20 May 1910 by direct computation At the time meteorologists performed forecasts principally by looking for similar weather patterns from records and then extrapolating forward Richardson attempted to use a mathematical model of the principal features of the atmosphere and use data taken at a specific time 7 AM to calculate the weather six hours later ab initio As meteorologist Peter Lynch makes clear 13 Richardson s forecast failed dramatically predicting a huge 145 hectopascals 4 3 inHg rise in pressure over six hours when the pressure actually was more or less static However detailed analysis by Lynch has shown that the cause was a failure to apply smoothing techniques to the data which rule out unphysical surges in pressure When these are applied Richardson s forecast is revealed to be essentially accurate a remarkable achievement considering the calculations were done by hand and while Richardson was serving with the Quaker ambulance unit in northern France Mathematical analysis of war EditThis section does not cite any sources Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources Unsourced material may be challenged and removed December 2020 Learn how and when to remove this template message Richardson also applied his mathematical skills in the service of his pacifist principles in particular in understanding the basis of international conflict For this reason he is now considered the initiator or co initiator with Quincy Wright and Pitirim Sorokin as well as others such as Kenneth Boulding Anatol Rapaport and Adam Curle of the scientific analysis of conflict an interdisciplinary topic of quantitative and mathematical social science dedicated to systematic investigation of the causes of war and conditions of peace As he had done with weather he analysed war using mainly differential equations and probability theory Considering the armament of two nations Richardson posited an idealised system of equations whereby 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 Solution of this system of equations allows insightful conclusions to be made regarding the nature and the stability or instability of various hypothetical conditions which might obtain between nations He also originated the theory that the propensity for war between two nations was a function of the length of their common border And in Arms and Insecurity 1949 and Statistics of Deadly Quarrels 1960 he sought to analyse the causes of war statistically Factors he assessed included economics language and religion In the preface of the latter he wrote There is in the world a great deal of brilliant witty political discussion which leads to no settled convictions My aim has been different namely to examine a few notions by quantitative techniques in the hope of reaching a reliable answer In Statistics of Deadly Quarrels Richardson presented data on virtually every war from 1815 to 1945 As a result he hypothesized a base 10 logarithmic scale for conflicts In other words there are many more small fights in which only a few people die than large ones that kill many While no conflict s size can be predicted beforehand indeed it is impossible to give an upper limit to the series overall they do form a Poisson distribution 14 On a smaller scale he showed the same pattern for gang murders in Chicago and Shanghai Others have noted that similar statistical patterns occur frequently whether planned lotteries with many more small payoffs than large wins or by natural organisation there are more small towns with grocery stores than big cities with superstores Research on the length of coastlines and borders EditMain article Coastline paradox Richardson decided to search for a relation between the probability of two countries going to war and the length of their common border However while collecting data he found that there was considerable variation in the various published lengths of international borders For example that between Spain and Portugal was variously quoted as 987 or 1214 km and that between the Netherlands and Belgium as 380 or 449 km 15 The reason for these inconsistencies is the coastline paradox Suppose the coast of Britain is measured using a 200 km ruler specifying that both ends of the ruler must touch the coast Now cut the ruler in half and repeat the measurement then repeat The smaller the ruler the longer the resulting coastline It might be supposed that these values would converge to a finite number representing the true length of the coastline However Richardson demonstrated that this is not the case the measured length of coastlines and other natural features increases without limit as the unit of measurement is made smaller 16 This is known nowadays as the Richardson effect 17 At the time Richardson s research was ignored by the scientific community Today it is considered an element of the beginning of the modern study of fractals Richardson s research was quoted by mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot in his 1967 paper How Long Is the Coast of Britain Richardson identified a value between 1 and 2 that would describe the changes with increasing measurement detail in observed complexity for a particular coastline this value served as a model for the concept of fractal dimension 18 Patents for detection of icebergs EditIn April 1912 soon after the loss of the ship Titanic Richardson registered a patent for iceberg detection using acoustic echolocation in air A month later he registered a similar patent for acoustic echolocation in water anticipating the invention of sonar by Paul Langevin and Robert Boyle 6 years later 19 In popular culture EditA fictional version of Richardson named Wallace Ryman plays a pivotal role in Giles Foden s novel Turbulence 20 Richardson is mentioned in John Brunner s work Stand on Zanzibar where Statistics of Deadly Quarrels is used as an argument that wars are inevitable Richardson s work is also mentioned in Poul Anderson s speculative fiction novelette Kings Who Die Richardson is mentioned in Charlie Kaufman s 2020 novel Antkind Richardson s famous quote Big whirls have little whirls that feed on their velocity little whirls have lesser whirls amp so on to viscosity is mentioned in the song Dots amp Lines written and performed by lyricist rapper Lupe Fiasco Personal life EditIn 1909 he married Dorothy Garnett 1885 1956 daughter of the mathematician and physicist William Garnett 21 They were unable to have children due to an incompatibility of blood types but they adopted two sons and a daughter between 1920 and 1927 22 Richardson s nephew Ralph Richardson became a noted actor His great nephew through his wife Dorothy s eldest brother James Clerk Maxwell Garnett C B E Julian Hunt went on to become a meteorologist and director general and chief executive of the British Meteorological Office from 1992 to 1997 23 A great niece of the same line of descent is the former politician Virginia Bottomley now Baroness Bottomley 24 25 Legacy EditSince 1997 the Lewis Fry Richardson Medal has been awarded by the European Geosciences Union for exceptional contributions to nonlinear geophysics in general by EGS until 2003 26 and by EGU since 2004 27 Winners have been 2023 Angelo Vulpiani 2022 Ulrike Feudel 2021 Berengere Dubrulle 2020 Valerio Lucarini 2019 Shaun Lovejoy 2018 Timothy N Palmer 2017 Edward Ott 2016 Peter L Read 2015 Daniel Schertzer 2014 Olivier Talagrand 2013 Jurgen Kurths 2012 Harry Swinney 2011 Catherine Nicolis 2010 Klaus Fraedrich 2009 Stephan Fauve 2008 Akiva Yaglom 2007 Ulrich Schumann 28 2006 Roberto Benzi 2005 Henk A Dijkstra 2004 Michael Ghil 2003 Uriel Frisch 2002 Friedrich Hermann Busse de 2001 Julian Hunt 2000 Benoit Mandelbrot 1999 Raymond Hide 1998 Vladimir Keilis Borok Since 1959 there has been a Peace Studies centre at Lancaster University named the Richardson Institute which carries out interdisciplinary research on peace and conflict in the spirit of Lewis Fry Richardson 29 See also EditAnomalous diffusion Arms race Coastline paradox Energy cascade War cycles Magnetic helicity Richardson extrapolation Richardson number Modified Richardson iteration Richards equation Multiscale turbulence Takebe Kenko Frederick W Lanchester List of peace activistsNotes Edit a b c Gold E 1954 Lewis Fry Richardson 1881 1953 Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society 9 1 216 235 doi 10 1098 rsbm 1954 0015 JSTOR 769208 S2CID 191485345 O Connor John J Robertson Edmund F Lewis Fry Richardson MacTutor History of Mathematics archive University of St Andrews Hunt p xiv Bootham School Register York England BOSA 2011 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography permanent dead link Hunt p xv Lewis Fry Richardson PDF Archived from the original PDF on 5 May 2016 Retrieved 30 January 2019 Ashford 1985 Ch 3 7 Royal Society election citation EC 1926 21 The Royal Society 1926 Archived from the original on 13 January 2013 Retrieved 21 January 2008 Korner T W 1996 A Quaker mathematician and Richardson on war Ch 8 and 9 in The Pleasures of Counting Cambridge U P Peter Lynch 2008 The origins of computer weather prediction and climate modeling PDF Journal of Computational Physics University of Miami 227 7 3436 Bibcode 2008JCoPh 227 3431L doi 10 1016 j jcp 2007 02 034 Archived from the original PDF on 8 July 2010 Retrieved 23 November 2010 Richardson Lewis Fry 1922 Weather Prediction by Numerical Processes Boston Cambridge University Press p 66 ISBN 9780511618291 Retrieved 23 February 2019 Lynch P 2006 The Emergence of Numerical Weather Prediction Cambridge U P Hayes Brian 2002 Computing Science Statistics of Deadly Quarrels American Scientist 90 1 10 15 doi 10 1511 2002 13 3269 ISSN 0003 0996 JSTOR 27857587 Lewis F Richardson 1961 The problem of contiguity An appendix to Statistics of Deadly Quarrels General Systems Yearbook of the Society for the Advancement of General Systems Theory Ann Arbor Mich The Society 1956 Society for General Systems Research 6 139 139 187 ISSN 0072 0798 OCLC 1429672 In the previous section integrals were taken around simple geometrical figures as a preliminary to taking them around frontiers shown on political maps An embarrassing doubt arose as to whether actual frontiers were so intricate as to invalidate that otherwise promising theory A special investigation was made to settle this question Some strange features came to notice nevertheless an over all general correction was found possible The results will now be reported As an explanation of how chance can arise in a world which he regarded as strictly deterministic Heri Poincare no date drew attention to insignificant causes which produced very noticeable effects Sea coasts provide an apt illustration a href Template Cite journal html title Template Cite journal cite journal a CS1 maint location link Fractals and the Fractal Dimension Vanderbilt University website accessed 30 January 2008 Archived 13 May 2008 at the Wayback Machine The Richardson Effect www futilitycloset com 2 December 2013 P G Drazin Fractals Collected Papers of Lewis Fry Richardson Volume 1 Cambridge University Press 1993 p 45 Michael A Ainslie Principles of Sonar Performance Modelling Springer 2010 ISBN 3 540 87661 8 page 10 Foden William Garnett 1850 1932 Brief biography on the British Society for the History of Mathematics website accessed 21 January 2008 Ashford 2004 Lewis Fry Richardson s weather forecasts changed the world But could Independent co uk 19 August 2014 Archived from the original on 14 June 2022 Obituary John Garnett Independent co uk 23 October 2011 Archived from the original on 14 June 2022 Archived copy Oxford Dictionary of National Biography online ed Oxford University Press doi 10 1093 ref odnb 33333 ISBN 978 0 19 861412 8 Archived from the original on 30 April 2018 Retrieved 29 April 2018 Subscription or UK public library membership required EGS Lewis Fry Richardson Medal Lewis Fry Richardson Medal Text of lecture From little whorls to the global atmosphere given by 2007 prizewinner Home References EditWilkinson David Deadly Quarrels Lewis F Richardson and the Statistical Study of War University of California Press 2018 online review Ashford Oliver M 1985 Prophet or Professor Life and Work of Lewis Fry Richardson Bristol Adam Hilger ISBN 978 0 85274 774 2 320pp Ashford Oliver M 2004 Richardson Lewis Fry 1881 1953 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography online ed Oxford University Press doi 10 1093 ref odnb 35739 Retrieved 19 January 2008 Subscription or UK public library membership required P A Davidson Y Kaneda K Moffatt and K R Sreenivasan eds 2011 A Voyage Through Turbulence chapter 5 pp 187 208 Cambridge University Press ISBN 978 0 521 19868 4 Hunt J C R 1998 Lewis Fry Richardson and His Contributions to Mathematics Meteorology and Models of Conflict PDF Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics 30 1 xiii xxxvi Bibcode 1998AnRFM 30D 13H doi 10 1146 annurev fluid 30 1 0 Archived from the original PDF on 27 February 2008 Retrieved 19 January 2008 Korner T W 1996 The Pleasures of Counting Cambridge Cambridge University Press ISBN 978 0 521 56823 4 544pp A Quaker mathematician Ch 8 and Richardson on war Ch 9 Lynch Peter June 2004 Richardson s forecast What went wrong PDF National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration NOAA Retrieved 19 April 2007 Lynch Peter 2006 The Emergence of Numerical Weather Prediction Richardson s Dream Cambridge Cambridge University Press ISBN 978 0 521 85729 1 290pp Richardson L F 1939 Generalized foreign politics The British Journal of Psychology monograph supplement No 23 Richardson L F 1960 Statistics of deadly quarrels Pacific Grove CA Boxwood Press Richardson L F 1993 Ashford Oliver M Charnock H Drazin P G Hunt J C R Smoker P Sutherland Ian eds The Collected Papers of Lewis Fry Richardson Volume 1 Meteorology and numerical analysis Cambridge Cambridge University Press ISBN 978 0 521 38297 7 1030pp Volume 2 Quantitative psychology and studies of conflict ISBN 978 0 521 38298 4 778pp Richardson L F 1910 The approximate arithmetical solution by finite differences of physical problems involving differential equations with an application to the stresses in a masonry dam Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 210 459 470 307 357 Bibcode 1911RSPTA 210 307R doi 10 1098 rsta 1911 0009 Foden Giles 2009 Turbulence London faber and faber ISBN 978 0 571 20522 6 353pp Angeletti Ferdinando 2021 Storicismo matematico e pacifismo scientifico due esempi di determinismo storico della meta del XX secolo in Iconografie europee di Walter Montanari e Shirin Zakeri a cura di Roma Nuova Cultura ISBN 978 8 833 65368 6 External links EditWorks by or about Lewis Fry Richardson at Internet Archive https www egu eu awards medals lewis fry richardson Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Lewis Fry Richardson amp oldid 1138680901, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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