Lewis F Richardson was trained as a physicist, but gained his fame first in meteorology and then in the study of conflict. Although he never gained employment at a leading university, his work in meteorology was widely respected by his contemporaries and has remained among the foundations of the field. His work on conflict was seen as more unorthodox. Certainly, his formal models and quantitative empirics were well ahead of the curve in the discipline of international relations in his lifetime. It was not until seven years after his death that his two major volumes on conflict found a publisher (Richardson, 1960a, b).
Since then, Richardson has been honored in various ways. In 1972, British Prime Minister Edward Heath opened a new wing of the Headquarters Building of the Meteorological Office named the Richardson Wing.Footnote 1 The Department of Mathematics at the University of York has sponsored a Lewis F Richardson lecture series since 2015.Footnote 2 Unusually, scientific prizes are named for him in both his main fields. In 1960, the Royal Meteorological Society established the annual LF Richardson Prize for meritorious papers by young authors in one of the journals of the society.Footnote 3 Since 1997, The European Geosciences Union has awarded the Lewis Fry Richardson Medal for ‘exceptional contributions to nonlinear geophysics in general’.Footnote 4 And from 2001, scholars who have spent most of their academic life in Europe and who have made exemplary scholarly contributions to the scientific study of militarized conflict, have been honored with the Lewis F Richardson Lifetime Award, with Michael Nicholson as the first recipient.Footnote 5 As I have experienced on a couple of occasions, if a conflict researcher gets an opportunity to speak to a group of meteorologists (say on the topic of climate change and conflict), a favorable mood can be generated by an early reference to Richardson.
Richardson was in many ways a loner. Although he carried out an extensive correspondence and was receptive to criticism of his own work – in fact, his two major volumes contain a number of fictional dialogues with his critics – he generally worked without assistants, and most of his work is single-authored. He often worked under difficult conditions. The extreme case is his work on meteorology while serving as an ambulance driver in France in World War I. In 1917, during the battle of Champagne, he sent his working copy of the manuscript on weather prediction ‘to the rear, where it became lost, only to be re-discovered some months later, under a heap of coal’ (Richardson, 1922: ix). Of course, as befitting a scholar of his generation, he relied very heavily on his wife Dorothy not just for moral support but in the practical work of carrying out experiments and in copy-editing.Footnote 6
As is evident from the timeline in the Appendix, Richardson spent most of his professional life in positions where he either worked on practical problems or taught science at the basic level, notably at Paisley Technical College (1929–40). Apparently, Richardson was not the world’s best teacher, but he is described as ‘conscientious and caring’ (Ashford, 1985: 150f). Much of his research was carried out in his spare time. It was only after retirement, for the last 13 years of his life, that he was able to devote himself full-time to research.
Richardson’s publications in meteorology, notably Weather Prediction by Numerical Process (Richardson, 1922) and a later article on atmospheric diffusion (Richardson, 1926), remain his most frequently cited items. The 1926 article is recorded with well over 1000 citations on Web of Science, including 42 citations in the first seven months of 2018!Footnote 7 Among his social science writings, his two posthumously published books top the list, with Arms and Insecurity (Richardson, 1960a) a little ahead of Statistics of Deadly Quarrels (1960b). Both of these books continue to be cited to this day, although not at the level of his 1926 article. Richardson (1961), another posthumous publication, is also widely cited.
For several years, Richardson maintained a strong interest in psychology, and delved into topics like intelligence, the quantitative assessment of pain, perception, and national hatred. He published in scholarly journals, including several articles in British Journal of Psychology, attended professional meetings, and even went to the trouble of acquiring an academic degree in psychology at the age of 48.Footnote 8 He also taught a psychology course in college. Several of Richardson’s articles in psychology are respectably cited, particularly his work on the measurement of sensations (Poulton, 1993). But on the whole he appears to have had more limited impact in this field, although some of his methods have been widely adopted. Richardson’s first major publication on conflict was, characteristically, titled The Mathematical Psychology of War (Richardson, 1919). That he focused on psychology rather than war when he more or less left meteorology in the 1920s, has been explained as a result of a hope that World War I had been so devastating that another major war seemed unlikely. When political and military developments turned to the worse in the 1930s, Richardson devoted almost all his research time to the question of war and peace (Nicholson, 1999: 543).