On Mon, 25 May 2009, wrote
On 25 May, 19:53, Alastair wrote:
On May 25, 5:20*pm, Kate Brown wrote:





Did anyone else hear Giles Foden on Radio 4 this morning talking to
Andrew Marr about his new book 'Turbulence'? *A lightly fictionalised
account of weathermen trying to forecast the conditions for D-Day, with
a leading character based on Lewis Somebody who had worked out massively
complex equations which can only now be attempted with parallel
computing.... *Sounded quite interesting to me, but then I don't know
very much about it!

http://www.faber.co.uk/work/turbulence/9780571205226/

The Radio 4 prog is hehttp://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00kj2dw

You can Listen Again or catch it later tonight. *The Foden bit is about
halfway through, I think.

--
Kate B

PS 'elvira' is spamtrapped - please reply to 'elviraspam' at
cockaigne dot org dot uk if you
want to reply personally

I heard it. *The bloke was Lewis Fry Richardson, the first man to try
to model the weather. *That was in the 1910s long before computers
were invented. But I think the reason his name rang a bell with me was
because he is the author of this verse:

* * Big whirls have little whirls that feed on their velocity,

* * * * and little whirls have lesser whirls and so on to viscosity.

There is a Wikipedia entry on him
hehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Fry_Richardson

Sadly his "Weather Prediction by Numerical Process" is not included in
the R Met Soc classic papers
at:http://www.rmets.org/about/history/classics.php

Wikipedia has answered a question that was bugging me:
Why did Mandelbrot write a paper about the length of the British
coastline when he was American?
The answer was that Richardson had already shown that the length is
fractal, long before Mandelbrot had coined that word!

I find it all very interesting.

Cheers, Alastair.- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Richardson's work was published as a book, not a paper as such. The
1922 book was reprinted by CUP in 2007 and is available from Amazon
etc (foreword by Peter Lynch). I can also recommend Oliver Ashford's
very readable biography "Prophet or Professor?: Life and Work of Lewis
Fry Richardson" published in 1984 - now out of print, but copies
available via Abebooks etc. Oliver Ashford also edited Richardson's
collected papers.

Oliver was a family friend of Richardson and is probably one of the
few perople left alive today who can recall the man himself. (Oliver
was 90 last year and still regularly attends RMetS meetings.)

I think it highly unlikely that Richardson would have approved of the
casting referred to in the original post, for he was a passionate
Quaker pacifist; during the First World War he served in the ambulance
brigade (1916-19) rather than take up arms against his fellow men. In
fact, it was whilst waiting for duties on the battlefield that his
theories were developed.

I think that was taken into consideration - apparently the protagonist
has to go up to the Hebrides to seek out the Richardson character, who
is a bit of a recluse and as you say a pacifist.

Of course, numerical weather forecasting only
began to become feasible in the late 1950s as computers became
affordable at institution/research department level,

they mentioned that too - apparently Richardson had a vision of an
Albert Hall sized array of 'computers' ie people computing his
equations. I don't know how or whether something like this is suggested
in the book.

and suggesting
there is any link with the famous D-Day forecast in 1944 is pure
fiction ... J M Stagg wrote about the event in 'Forecast for Overlord
(1971). It's difficult to think of a forecast with more hanging on it
than this one, of course!

Foden was quite clear it was fiction, but had clearly gone into it with
a lot of brio. I'd be very interested to hear anybody's informed
opinion of the book in due course!


--
Kate B

PS 'elvira' is spamtrapped - please reply to 'elviraspam' at cockaigne dot org dot uk if you
want to reply personally