Richardson, Lewis Fry

[person]

English meteorologist born in Newcastle upon Tyne, Northumberland (1881-1953). Richardson was the first to apply mathematics (the method of finite differences) to predicting the weather. He published his results in Weather Prediction by Numerical Process (1922). This work laid the foundations for modern weather modeling and prediction. Richardson was a Quaker and a conscientious objector, and spent a significant amount of time, in his later years, analyzing the causes of war. He attempted to use differential equations to model factors like the psychology of a population, believing these factors to outweigh any single decision by a leader in determining if a country would go to war.