The chair was founded by an endowment of £3,600 from one John Richardson, in 1890.
The endowment was originally used to support the Richardson Lectureship in Mathematics.
[1] One holder of the Richardson Lectureship was John Edensor Littlewood (1907-1910).
The position lapsed in 1918, but was resurrected as a lectureship in Pure Mathematics between 1935 and 1944.
There was then a further hiatus until the establishment of the Richardson Chair of Applied Mathematics in 1998.