A very technical examination of the world’s first numerical weather “prediction” – although in fact it was really a “postdiction”, taking detailed data and using it to compute a scenario that could be compared against a known ground truth. It was an incredible achievement anyway, performing manually and at low resolution the calculations now routinely performed by computers.

Richardson was the person who saw that this would be possible, realising that the physics and mathematics could be solved even though the computational capabilities didn’t exist. In this he foresaw the emergence of the modern power of data, where the existence of more and better data transforms both the way we do science and the sciene that we do. It’s something that should put him alongside Turing and Von Neumann as visionaries of what computation could achieve.

4/5. Finished Sunday 21 April, 2024.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)