(This article was originally published at Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, and syndicated at StatsBlogs.)
Lee Sechrest writes:
If you get a chance, Wiki this guy:
I [Sechrest] did and was gratifyingly reminded that I read some bits of his work in graduate school 60 years ago. Specifically, about his math models for predicting wars and his work on fractals to arrive at better estimates of the lengths of common boundaries between nations. Pretty remarkable.
Cool indeed.
Lots and lots of great stuff in this mini-bio, for example:
One of Richardson’s most celebrated achievements is his retroactive attempt to forecast the weather during a single day—20 May 1910—by direct computation. At the time, meteorologists performed forecasts principally by looking for similar weather patterns from past records, and then extrapolating forward. Richardson attempted to use a mathematical model of the principal features of the atmosphere, and use data taken at a specific time (7 AM) to calculate the weather six hours later ab initio. As Lynch makes clear, Richardson’s forecast failed dramatically, predicting a huge 145 hectopascals (4.3 inHg) rise in pressure over six hours when the pressure actually was more or less static. However, detailed analysis by Lynch has shown that the cause was a failure to apply smoothing techniques to the data, which rule out unphysical surges in pressure. When these are applied, Richardson’s forecast is revealed to be essentially accurate—a remarkable achievement considering the calculations were done by hand, and while Richardson was serving with the Quaker ambulance unit in northern France.
It also mentions his statistical modeling of international disputes. I wonder what today’s international relations scholars think of this work. I’m sure they’ve gone much farther along in sophistication, but I wonder whether they see Richardson’s work as an interesting precursor or as a dead end.
He also appears to have come up with the idea of fractal dimension in the length of coastlines, inspiring the famous writings of Mandelbrot on the topic:
At the time, Richardson’s research was ignored by the scientific community. Today, it is considered an element of the beginning of the modern study of fractals. Richardson’s research was quoted by mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot in his 1967 paper How Long Is the Coast of Britain? Richardson identified a value (between 1 and 2) that would describe the changes (with increasing measurement detail) in observed complexity for a particular coastline; this value served as a model for the concept of fractal dimension.
I’d never heard of this guy but apparently he’s pretty well known. For one thing, he has this long wikipedia page; for another, it says that the European Geosciences Union has an award named after him. But perhaps his closest connection to fame is that he’s the uncle of actor Ralph Richardson. Which is a little bit like me being famous because my distant relation to Marge Simpson (apparently, she’s married to a cousin of mine in L.A. whom I’ve never met).
P.S. I gave the post this title (which I adapted from the link to the above Wikipedia image) because it reminds me of the song, “Cezanne, father of cubism,” which I only heard once, on the radio many years ago, but which Google and Youtube assure me actually exists.
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