Lewis Fry Richardson: His Intellectual Legacy and Influence in the Social Sciences by Nils Petter Gleditsch
Lewis F Richardson occupied an important position in two academic fields as different as meteorology and peace research, with academic prizes awarded in both disciplines.
In peace research, he pioneered the use of mathematical models and the meticulous compilation of databases for empirical research.
As a quaker and pacifist, he refused to work in preparations for war, paid a heavy prize in terms of his career, and (at least in the social sciences) was fully recognized as a pioneering scholar only posthumously with the publication of two major books.
Lewis Fry Richardson is one of the 20th century's greatest but least appreciated thinkers-a creative physicist, psychologist, meteorologist, applied mathematician, historian, pacifist, statistician, and witty stylist. If you've heard of weather prediction, chaos, fractals, cliometrics, peace science, big data, thick tails, or black swans, then you have benefited from Richardson's prescience in bringing unruly phenomena into the ambit of scientific understanding. Richardson's ideas continue to be relevant today, and this collection is a superb retrospective on this brilliant and lovable man.
Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor, Harvard University, and the author of The Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now