Lewis Fry Richardson (1881-1953) made numerous, outstanding scientific contributions to geophysics but been recognized, perhaps his main contribution asone of the founding fathers of the idea of scaling and fractality (made famous by Benoit Mandelbrot) has still not received the attention it deserves.

We also owe to Richardson the long-term weather forecasts announced in newspapers and on TV. For Richardson was the first not only to suggest numerical integration of the equations of motion of the atmosphere, but also to attempt to do so by hand, during the First World War. He organized an "orchestra" of calculator users in a large room, "conducting" them by flashlight. His forecasting failed for a reason which was not understood for years, until the German-American Richard Courant showed that such calculations required a corrective factor to be "timely".

This work, as well as a presentation of a broad vision of future developments in the field, appeared in his famous, pioneering book Weather Prediction by Numerical Processes (1922). In this work he uses data from work by Vilhelm Bjerknes published in Dynamical meteorology and hydrography.

As a consequence of his atmospheric studies, the nondimensional number associated with fluid convective stability has been called the Richardson number. Also, his book presents a study of the limitations of numerical integration of these equations, suggesting, for the first time (in a poem Richardson composed) that turbulent cascades are the fundamental driving mechanism of the atmosphere. In these cascades, large eddies break up into smaller eddies having no characteristic scales, all the way from the planetary scale down to the viscous scale. This led to the Richardson law of turbulent diffusion (1926), suggesting that particles trajectories might not be describable by smooth curves (what Menger called "fluents"), but that such trajectories might instead require highly convoluted curves such as the Peano or Weierstrass nondifferentiable curves (Menger's "tremblants") for their description. As a founder of the cascade and scaling theories of atmospheric dynamics, Richardson anticipated the Kolmogorov law (1941).

He also used scaling ideas to invent the Richardson dividers method of successively increasing the resolution of fractal curves and tested out the method on geographical boundaries (as part of his wartime studies).

In the latter work he anticipated recent efforts to study scale invariance in rivers and topography.

As a conscientious objector, Richardson was compelled to quit the United Kingdom Meteorological Office in 1920 when the latter was militarized by integation into the Air Ministry. He subsequently became head of the Physics Department at Westminster Training College, then Principal of Paisley College of Technology in Scotland.

In 1940, he retired to do research on war, which was published posthumously in book form (Richardson, 1963). This took up his earlier work: Generalized Foreign Politics (1939), Arms and Insecurity (1949), and Statistics of Deadly Quarrels (1950). This portion of his work is testimony to the trauma caused by the two World Wars, leading Richardson and other scientists (see file on Leo Szilard at this Website) to use their skills in rational attempts to eradicate the source of conflict. Unfortunately, this remains an open field of research.