Lewis Fry Richardson is well known to meteorologists as the father of numerical weather prediction - the forecasting of the weather by computer.
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; the theory seemed plausible, but it involved an inordinate amount of calculation. Richardson tried it out himself, painstakingly working through the calculations over a period of several months to produce a six-hour forecast, but the result was disappointing. The technique was largely ignored until the advent of computers, and Richardson died in 1953, aged 72, just as his ideas were about to be translated into practice.
Other theories of Lewis Fry Richardson, however, have yet to be exploited, and have an interesting relevance to international developments today. 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 - or murder. 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, indicate d 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 times".