Lewis Fry Richardson was the youngest of seven children born to Catherine Fry (1838-1919) and David Richardson (1835-1913). They were a prosperous Quaker family, David Richardson operating a successful tanning and leather manufacturing business. At age 12 he was sent to a Quaker boarding school, Bootham School in York, where he received an education in science, which stimulated an active interest in natural history. In 1898 he went on to Durham College of Science (a college of Durham University) where he took courses in mathematical physics, chemistry, botany, and zoology.

Richardson decided to search for a relation between the probability of two countries going to war and the length of their common border. However, while collecting data, he found that there was considerable variation in the various published lengths of international borders. For example, that between Spain and Portugal was variously quoted as 987 or 1214 km, and that between the Netherlands and Belgium as 380 or 449 km. The reason for these inconsistencies is the "coastline paradox". Suppose the coast of Britain is measured using a 200 km ruler, specifying that both ends of the ruler must touch the coast. Now cut the ruler in half and repeat the measurement, then repeat: Notice that the smaller the ruler, the longer the resulting coastline. It might be supposed that these values would converge to a finite number representing the true length of the coastline. However, Richardson demonstrated that this is not the case: the measured length of coastlines, and other natural features, increases without limit as the unit of measurement is made smaller. This is known nowadays as the Richardson effect. At the time, Richardson's research was ignored by the scientific community. Today, it is considered an element of the beginning of the modern study of fractals. Richardson's research was quoted by mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot in his 1967 paper How Long Is the Coast of Britain? Richardson identified a value (between 1 and 2) that would describe the changes (with increasing measurement detail) in observed complexity for a particular coastline; this value served as a model for the concept of fractal dimension.

Has his research been useful?
At the time, Richardson's research was ignored by the scientific community. Today, it is considered an element of the beginning of the modern study of fractals.