Richard Samuel Ward FRS (born 6 September 1951) is a British mathematical physicist.
He is most famous for his extension of Penrose's twistor theory to nonlinear cases, which he with Michael Atiyah used to describe instantons by vector bundles on the three-dimensional complex projective space.
[6] His certificate of election reads: Richard Ward is distinguished for pioneering and elegant research in mathematical physics.
He adapted the twistor transform to the self-dual Yang-Mills (SDYM) equation, and with Atiyah constructed general multi-instanton solutions.
He showed that virtually all known integrable equations arise from SDYM by dimensional and algebraic reductions, allowing a unified solution method.