Lewis Fry Richardson: His Intellectual Legacy and Influence in the Social Sciences

Lewis Fry Richardson: His Intellectual Legacy and Influence in the Social Sciences PDF

Author: Nils Petter Gleditsch

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2019-12-10

Total Pages: 154

ISBN-13: 3030315894

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This is an open access book. Lewis F Richardson (1981-1953), a physicist by training, was a pioneer in meteorology and peace research and remains a towering presence in both fields. This edited volume reviews his work and assesses its influence in the social sciences, notably his work on arms races and their consequences, mathematical models, the size distribution of wars, and geographical features of conflict. It contains brief bibliographies of his main publications and of articles and books written about Richardson and his work and discusses his continuing influence in peace research and international relations as well as his attitude to the ethical responsibilities of a scientist. It will be of interest to a wide range of scholars. This book includes 11 chapters written by Nils Petter Gleditsch, Dina A Zinnes, Ron Smith, Paul F Diehl, Kelly Kadera, Mark Crescenzi, Michael D Ward, Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, Nils B Weidmann, Jürgen Scheffran, Niall MacKay, Aaron Clauset, Michael Spagat and Stijn van Weezel. 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

Deadly Quarrels

Deadly Quarrels PDF

Author: David Wilkinson

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2024-07-26

Total Pages: 219

ISBN-13: 0520377435

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Lewis Fry Richardson was one of the first to develop the systematic study of the causes of war; yet his great war data archive, Statistics of Deadly Quarrels, posthumously published, has yet to be fully systematized and assimilated by war-causation scholars. David Wilkinson has reanalyzed Richardson's data and drawn together the results of kindred quantitative work on the causes of war, from other as well as from Richardson. He has translated this classic of international relations literature into contemporary idiom, fully and accurately presenting the substance of Richardson's idea and at the same time bringing it up to date with judicious comment, updating the references to the critical and successor literature, and dealing in some detail with Richardson himself. Professor Wilkinson lists among the findings: 1. the death toll of war is largely the product of a very few immense wars; 2. most wars do not escalate out of control, they are vey likely to be small, brief, and exclusive; 3. great powers have done most of the world's fighting, inflicting and suffering most of the casualties; 4. the propensity of any two groups to fight increases as the ethnocultural differences between them increase. Contemporary peace strategy would therefore seem to be to avoid World War III by promoting superpower detente, and reanimating, accelerating, and civilizing the process of world economic development. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1980.

Invisible in the Storm

Invisible in the Storm PDF

Author: Ian Roulstone

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2013-02-21

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 1400846226

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An accessible book that examines the mathematics of weather prediction Invisible in the Storm is the first book to recount the history, personalities, and ideas behind one of the greatest scientific successes of modern times—the use of mathematics in weather prediction. Although humans have tried to forecast weather for millennia, mathematical principles were used in meteorology only after the turn of the twentieth century. From the first proposal for using mathematics to predict weather, to the supercomputers that now process meteorological information gathered from satellites and weather stations, Ian Roulstone and John Norbury narrate the groundbreaking evolution of modern forecasting. The authors begin with Vilhelm Bjerknes, a Norwegian physicist and meteorologist who in 1904 came up with a method now known as numerical weather prediction. Although his proposed calculations could not be implemented without computers, his early attempts, along with those of Lewis Fry Richardson, marked a turning point in atmospheric science. Roulstone and Norbury describe the discovery of chaos theory's butterfly effect, in which tiny variations in initial conditions produce large variations in the long-term behavior of a system—dashing the hopes of perfect predictability for weather patterns. They explore how weather forecasters today formulate their ideas through state-of-the-art mathematics, taking into account limitations to predictability. Millions of variables—known, unknown, and approximate—as well as billions of calculations, are involved in every forecast, producing informative and fascinating modern computer simulations of the Earth system. Accessible and timely, Invisible in the Storm explains the crucial role of mathematics in understanding the ever-changing weather. Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.

Weather, Macroweather, and the Climate

Weather, Macroweather, and the Climate PDF

Author: Shaun Lovejoy

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-03-19

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0190864230

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Weather, Macroweather, and the Climate is an insider's attempt to explain as simply as possible how to understand the atmospheric variability that occurs over an astonishing range of scales: from millimeters to the size of the planet, from milliseconds to billions of years. The variability is so large that standard ways of dealing with it are utterly inadequate: in 2015, it was found that classical approaches had underestimated the variability by the astronomical factor of a quadrillion (a million billion). Author Shaun Lovejoy asks - and answers - many fundamental questions such as: Is the atmosphere random or deterministic? What is turbulence? How big is a cloud (what is the appropriate notion of size itself)? What is its dimension? How can we conceptualize the structures within structures within structures spanning millimeters to thousands of kilometers and milliseconds to the age of the planet? What is weather? What is climate? Lovejoy shows in simple terms why the industrial epoch warming can't be natural - much simpler than trying to show that it's anthropogenic. We will discuss in simple terms how to make the best seasonal and annual forecasts - without giant numerical models. Above all, the book offers readers a new understanding of the atmosphere.

A Voyage Through Turbulence

A Voyage Through Turbulence PDF

Author: Peter A. Davidson

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2011-09-08

Total Pages: 451

ISBN-13: 1139502042

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Turbulence is widely recognized as one of the outstanding problems of the physical sciences, but it still remains only partially understood despite having attracted the sustained efforts of many leading scientists for well over a century. In A Voyage Through Turbulence we are transported through a crucial period of the history of the subject via biographies of twelve of its great personalities, starting with Osborne Reynolds and his pioneering work of the 1880s. This book will provide absorbing reading for every scientist, mathematician and engineer interested in the history and culture of turbulence, as background to the intense challenges that this universal phenomenon still presents.

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