WEATHER EYE yesterday celebrated Lewis Fry Richardson's novel proposals for forecasting the weather by means of mathematical equations. Richardson was born in 1881 and in Weather Prediction by Numerical Methods, published in 1922, he described how the future pressure pattern could be calculated if the present state of the atmosphere was accurately known. At the time, however, it was a method without a means; it was ignored until the advent of computers, and Richardson died in 1953, just as his ideas were about to be translated into practice.
Other theories of Richardson, however, have yet to be exploited. In keeping with his Quaker origins, Richardson devoted the later part of his life to "peace research", in which - paradoxically perhaps - he tried to model mathematically the different national tendencies for war. Delving into the history books, he compiled statistics on all recorded hostilities from 1500 to 1948, classifying them according to the numbers of casualties involved. His highest category was that of wars with a death toll of more than a million people; his lowest was a single casualty - a category which comprised, quite simply, murders.
Richardson noted, for example, that the tendency for wars to break out during a given period followed a pattern known to scientists as the "poisson distribution", a rate of occurrence that applies to many natural phenomena. This, to his mind, indicated a certain mathematical inevitability of conflict, far removed, as he put it, from "the wide variety of causes that appear in the newspapers every day, including protracted and critical negotiations, the inordinate ambition of the opposing statesmen, and the suspected movements of their armed personnel". Richardson went on to assign symbols to represent the number of participants, the fatalities, the religious and sociological characteristics of those involved, and then constructed mathematical equations to describe the evolution of hostilities.
Interestingly perhaps, The Statistics of Deadly Quarrels, as Richardson called the work, "dissipated the legend that there are orderly or disorderly peoples; all nations are orderly or disorderly according to the time".
"There is little hope," he went on, "of forming a group of permanently peace loving nations to keep the perennially aggressive nations in subjection. Instead, the facts support an international order in which a majority of the momentarily peace loving nations, changing kaleidoscopically in its membership, may hope to restrain a changing minority of momentarily aggressive fellow nations.