William Graham Richards CBE FRS FLSW CChem HonFRSC (1 October 1939 – 11 February 2025)[3] was a chemist and Emeritus Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford.

Benefiting from the economic and legal changes, the company was floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1992, making the university £10 million.

[citation needed] He then studied the electronic spectroscopy of diatomic molecules with Richard F. Barrow,[5] earning his Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy[1] degrees from the University of Oxford in 1964.

[4] In the fourth year of his degree course Richards' research project led him to using Oxford's Ferranti Mercury computer to solve integrals.

[6] His influential paper Third age of quantum chemistry (1979) marked the development of computational techniques for theoretical analysis whose precision equaled or surpassed experimental results.

[15][16][17] "The work represents perhaps a near perfect instance of theory being in harmony with experiment, each aspect vital to the other and the combination much more than the sum of the separate parts."

He was the first to produce coloured images modelling molecular structure graphically,[2] and introduced many of the techniques now widely used in academia and industry.

[19] In 1989, Richards was the scientific co-founder (with Tony Marchington, David Ricketts, James Hiddleston, and Anthony Rees) of Oxford Molecular Limited.

[20] The company was possible in part because of economic and legal changes under the government of Margaret Thatcher that enabled British universities to become involved with venture capital and technology transfer.

As Oxford Molecular Group, Ltd. (OMG) the company was floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1992, making the university £10 million.

[7] Norwood then arranged for Beeson-Gregory to provide £20 million in exchange for half the University's equity share of any spin-out companies emanating from the Chemistry Department for 15 years.

Using idle time from these computers, the project's software created a virtual supercomputer that screened billions of compounds against protein targets, searching for possible drug treatments for cancer, anthrax and smallpox.

[6][25][26] The project involved collaboration between Intel, United Devices, and the Centre for Computational Drug Discovery at the University of Oxford,[27] headed by Richards[9] and funded by the National Foundation for Cancer Research (NFCR).