A very interesting British scientist who was a Quaker and a pacifist. He was born in 1886. He was a mathematician, physicist and meteorologist. At the age of 46 (1932), he also earned a degree in psychology. On 20 May, 1910, he tried to predict the weather using calculations by hand. His prediction was off, but when smoothing techniques are applied to his data, they turn out to be fairly accurate even by today's standards. In WW1, he was a conscientious objector, but still drove an ambulance as part of the 16th French Infantry Division. Afterwards, he was prevented from holding any academic position as a result. Before the war, he worked for the British Meteorological Office, and rejoined it after the war. He resigned a few years later when it became part of the Air Ministry. In 1922, he wrote a paper called Weather Prediction by Numerical Process, which described how to predict weather by solving differential equations. His method is still used today. In 1950, he tried to use mathematics to analyse war and peace, thus helping to initiate the scientific analysis of conflict, or a science of war. His theory was that the probability of two countries going to war was related to the length of their shared border. At the time, there was no agreed measure of borders. When he tried to calculate border lengths himself, he found that length of the border kept growing as he shrank the ruler. This is known as the Richardson effect. He published his findings in 1961, in a paper with the title "The Problem of Contiguity: An Appendix to Statistics of Deadly Quarrels". His work was ignored by most of the scientific community. This effect later became one of the foundational ideas of fractals, when it was taken up by Benoit Mandelbrot. In 1967, he published a paper bringing Richardson's work to light: "How Long Is the Coast of Britain? Statistical Self-Similarity and Fractional Dimension." The fundamental message of Richardson's discovery is: > In general, it is meaningless to quote the value of a measured length without stating the scale of the resolution used to make it. In principle, it is as meaningless as saying that a length is 543, 267, or 1.289176 without giving the units it's measured in. Just as we need to know if it is in miles, centimeters, or angstroms, we also need to know the resolution that was used. --- Source: [[Reference Notes/Scale]]