Richardson, Lewis Fry, 1881–1953, British physicist and pioneering meteorologist, grad. Cambridge (1903), Univ. of London (B.Sc. 1929). Richardson worked at the National Physical Laboratory (1902–4, 1907–9) and the Meteorological Office (1913–16, 1919–20). He also held posts at University College Aberystwyth (1905–6) and Manchester College of Technology (1912–13), and later was chairman of the physics department at Westminster Training College, London (1920–29) and principal of the Paisley College of Technology, Paisley, Scotland (1929–40). He pioneered the use of mathematical techniques in weather forecasting, first publishing his work in Weather Prediction by Numerical Process (1922). The lack of computer technology, however, made necessary calculations too time-consuming to be of use in forecasting. A conscientious objector during World War I, Richardson served in the Friends Ambulance Unit (1916–19), and later produced studies that used mathematics as a tool to determine the causes of war, including Generalized Foreign Politics (1939), Arms and Insecurity (1949), and Statistics of Deadly Quarrels (1950).
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