Lewis Fry Richardson

Lewis Fry Richardson was born in 1881 into an English Quaker family, studied at Cambridge, and spent his working life moving between three careers most people would consider incompatible: mathematical physics, meteorology, and the statistical study of war. The Quaker thread runs through all three. He could not in conscience take a university post that required him to contribute to military research, and so he worked at a peat-bog research station, a national physics laboratory, and a small teacher-training college, turning down better offers on principle.

In 1922 he published Weather Prediction by Numerical Process, the book that invented modern meteorology. It proposed, decades before computers existed, that the atmosphere could be forecast by dividing the globe into a grid of cells and numerically stepping forward the equations of fluid motion and thermodynamics. He estimated, with an accountant's seriousness, the staffing required: 64,000 human computers with slide rules, working in shifts in a domed theatre. His own hand-computed trial forecast famously produced nonsense, because he had no way to filter out the fast-moving acoustic modes of the equations. Forty years later Jule Charney would fix that problem and run the same scheme on ENIAC.

Buried inside Weather Prediction is the four-line verse that every fluid-dynamicist can quote: Big whorls have little whorls that feed on their velocity, and little whorls have lesser whorls and so on to viscosity — in the molecular sense. It is a parody of Swift's couplet about fleas, and it is also the physical picture that Andrey Kolmogorov made quantitative nineteen years later.