Elizabeth Cicely Ridley (née Taylor, September 26, 1927 – December 23, 2008)[1] was a British-American applied mathematician known for her work in numerical quantum chemistry and in climate modeling.
The Roble–Dickinson–Ridley code that she and her collaborators created at the National Center for Atmospheric Research was the first general circulation model of the thermosphere.
She earned a master's degree in physics in 1951, with first-class honours, in 1951, and remained at Cambridge as a doctoral student of Douglas Hartree, completing her Ph.D. in 1955.
[3] After finishing her doctorate, she became a researcher at the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, at what is now the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus; her work there involved computing the electron configuration of uranium,[1] and applied mathematician John P. Boyd has called her "a pathfinder in numerical quantum chemistry" for this work.
She joined the National Center for Atmospheric Research in 1968, working for them on computer codes for climate modeling of both the Earth and Venus.