I to gang wars in Chicago. He characterized the intensity of the quarrels by the logarithm of the number of persons killed in them and found that intensity was inversely proportional to frequency. He found that the onset times of quarrels were random and could be described by a Poisson law. He became the father of war-gaming. The study of this simple model led him to the pessimistic conclusion that most confrontations between nations are unstable.
War is a permanent feature of the human condition.
He was further vexed by the fact that his research on the flow of air was used in the twenties and thirties by military technologists dealing with the dispersal of poison gases. Richardson was also a pioneer in the study of fractals. In classifying and studying the variety of reasons for war, he had to define the length of the boundary between two adjacent countries. He was an unorthodox scientist, never in the mainstream. He never played it safe.