He is also noted for his pioneering work on fractals and a method for solving a system of linear equations known as modified Richardson iteration.

He proceeded in 1900 to King's College, Cambridge, where he was taught physics in the natural sciences tripos by (among others) J. J. Thomson and graduated with a first-class degree in 1903.

[1][9] Richardson's Quaker beliefs entailed an ardent pacifism that exempted him from military service during World War I as a conscientious objector, though this subsequently disqualified him from having any academic post.

According to Thomas Körner,[10] the discovery that his meteorological work was of value to chemical weapons designers caused him to abandon his efforts in this field and destroy findings he had not yet published.

Imagine a large hall like a theatre, except that the circles and galleries go right round through the space usually occupied by the stage.

Four senior clerks in the central pulpit are collecting the future weather as fast as it is being computed, and despatching it by pneumatic carrier to a quiet room.

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.

But 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.

For this reason, he is now considered the initiator, or co-initiator (with Quincy Wright and Pitirim Sorokin as well as others such as Kenneth Boulding, Anatol Rapaport and Adam Curle), of the scientific analysis of conflict—an interdisciplinary topic of quantitative and mathematical social science dedicated to systematic investigation of the causes of war and conditions of peace.

Solutions of this system of equations yield insightful conclusions about the nature, and the stability or instability, of various hypothetical conditions that might obtain between nations.

In the preface of the latter, he wrote: "There is in the world a great deal of brilliant, witty political discussion which leads to no settled convictions.

While conflicts' sizes can be predicted ahead of time, Richardson showed that the number of international wars per year follows a Poisson distribution.

[14] On a smaller scale he showed a similar pattern for gang murders in Chicago and Shanghai, and hypothesized that a universal rule connected the frequency and the size of all "deadly quarrels".

[19] In April 1912, soon after the loss of the ship Titanic, Richardson registered a patent for iceberg detection using acoustic echolocation in air.

A month later he registered a similar patent for acoustic echolocation in water, anticipating the invention of sonar by Paul Langevin and Robert Boyle 6 years later.

[20] A fictional version of Richardson, named Wallace Ryman, plays a pivotal role in Giles Foden's novel Turbulence.

[21] Richardson is mentioned in John Brunner's book Stand on Zanzibar, where Statistics of Deadly Quarrels is used as an argument that wars are inevitable.

His great-nephew (through his wife Dorothy's eldest brother, (James Clerk) Maxwell Garnett), Julian Hunt, became a meteorologist and director general and chief executive of the British Meteorological Office from 1992 to 1997.

[25][26] Since 1997, the Lewis Fry Richardson Medal has been awarded by the European Geosciences Union for "exceptional contributions to nonlinear geophysics in general" (by EGS until 2003[27] and by EGU since 2004).