Photo: Image of Lewis Fry Richardson by Kurt Hutton.
Insight and blindspots: Anne Watson wrestles with Lewis Fry Richardson
‘His own values were more important to him than institutional values.’
Lewis Fry Richardson was born in 1881 as the seventh and youngest child in a high-achieving Quaker family. The children mainly attended Quaker schools and developed lives that showed elements of Quaker values, many being directly involved in pacifism, teaching and scientific enquiry. I became interested in Lewis because of his use of mathematics in war studies, arising from his stated intention to use mathematics, physics and psychology for ‘good’ purposes. The seeds for this were planted at Bootham School, where the idea that scientific inquiry is a duty was embedded in him.
While studying at Cambridge, Richardson worked on meteorology, because weather forecasting enabled food production. This took him into higher mathematics, particularly differential equations, on which he became an expert at a time when tedious calculations had to be done by hand (one of his inventions was a method that speeded up the process – it is now called Richardson Iteration and is widely used). Richardson responded to the Titanic disaster by inventing and patenting, within days, object-locating systems that presaged the later invention of radar. In his study and work situations he was often expected, or invited, to use his knowledge and initiative for military purposes, but he refused these and went elsewhere, leaving behind him a method of weather forecasting that is now used worldwide, computing power having taken over the slow and error-prone hand calculations that he had needed to do (or gave his wife to do). His methods have since revealed the chaotic variations of weather known as ‘the butterfly effect’.
During the first world war Richardson served in the Friends Ambulance Unit, and began to contemplate whether mathematics could contribute to understanding the causes of war. One of his inquiries was whether the length of boundaries between countries might be a factor in the development of, or the pacification of, what he called ‘deadly quarrels’. In exploring this he found what is now known as the Richardson Effect, now one of the foundations of fractal geometry, namely that shorter units of measurement lead to greater estimates of length because they are better at including the wiggles of irregular boundaries. Mandelbrot’s name is usually attached to this but he credited Lewis Fry Richardson.
The bigger task for Lewis was to see how mathematics might illuminate the way that wars happen. This took up most of his life until his death in 1953 and led him to study statistics and psychology. In this work he became a pioneer of the use of mathematics to describe, and possibly predict, the behaviour of groups of people using methods that are now commonplace in the social sciences. Since his death his pioneering work on war (he was the first to mathematise the arms race) has been published and used extensively as an example of the use of modelling in complex human situations in academic international and peace studies. His hope had been that a detailed description of the elements and relationships involved in the approach towards war would give politicians useful knowledge about the levers that they might use to avoid conflict. His original model was based on studying data from 300 wars from 1815 to 1950, most of which happened mainly on the ground. Modern students adapt this approach to take account of sea, air and digital conflict. Lewis’ work could not take into account the rapidity with which potentates can control social media to augment sources of conflict, although it did identify the disgruntlements that such leaders can manipulate.
Nearly all Richardson’s work was done in his own time or after retirement, because he could not get academic funding for it. This was partly due to his conscientious objection to using funding that was primarily for military purposes, but also due to the non-existence of neutral war or peace studies in academia. He is seen as a founder of such studies, and the Richardson Institute at the University of Lancaster is named after him.
Despite his achievements, Richardson was a humble man. In his attempts to publish honestly he did not make strong claims but always offered doubts and arguments that people might raise about his work. This was not what academic journals wanted to publish, despite his membership of the Royal Society. He spent most of his paid career teaching physics in technical institutes where he was said to be caring, inspiring and effective principal.
‘The bigger task for Lewis was to see how mathematics might illuminate the way that wars happen.’
One reason I am so fascinated by Richardson is that his own values were more important to him than institutional values. For example, he was a world expert on air flow in the upper atmosphere, but would not work for the Air Ministry, particularly after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Several science obituaries mention how being a Quaker influenced his refusal to pursue certain directions of work. Yet his influence in several scientific fields lives on, and the kinds of choices he had to make about personal advancement probably also live on in the current careers of Quaker scientists.
Another reason for my fascination is Richardson’s membership of the Eugenics Education Society. At Cambridge he was influenced by Karl Pearson whose pioneering work in statistics, following Galton, was to some extent driven by a desire to compare characteristics of racial groups, and identify ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ groups. Both Galton and Pearson came from Quaker families but they were not themselves Quakers. This linked Lewis to an influential movement of people who, in various ways, felt that Darwin’s observations about survival of the fittest could be accelerated by social manipulation. For some, this bolstered campaigns for universal education, and better housing and health care. It also, thanks to Quakers Lionel Penrose and Lancelot Hogben, laid foundations for how understanding genes might improve disease control and health. But, particularly in the US, heredity studies led to efforts to limit the reproduction of people seen as less fit, even as far as incarceration and sterilisation for some.
One of Lewis’ findings was that intermarriage between nations could have a pacifying effect on potential wars. He used an argument derived from a belief in the superiority of certain groups to suggest that managerial classes from different nations could intermarry without deterioration of the superior ‘stock’. That he published this in 1950, after the extreme uses of eugenic beliefs in Nazi Germany, is very hard to understand. Maybe he really did believe that some people were genetically more fit than others; after all, his siblings were examples of high achievement and influence.
I am left with two questions: Does his apparent belief in eugenics undermine his multiple achievements? And how often do I use ‘from a Quaker family’ as shorthand for assumptions about someone’s core beliefs about humanity and equality?
