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Sir Owen Willans Richardson (26 April 1879 – 15 February 1959) was a British physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1928 for his work on thermionic emission and for the discovery of Richardson's law. Owen Richardson's Nobel lecture on thermionics, 12 December 1929
In 1906, Richardson was appointed Professor of Physics at Princeton University, a position he held until 1913. The following year, he returned to England to become Wheatstone Professor of Physics at King's College London, where he was later made Director of Research in 1924. In 1927, he was one of the participants of the fifth Solvay Conference on Physics that took place at the International Solvay Institute for Physics in Belgium. He retired from King’s College in 1944.
Richardson also researched the photoelectric effect, the gyromagnetic effect, the emission of electrons by chemical reactions, soft X-rays, and the spectrum of hydrogen.
Richardson died on 15 February 1959 in Alton at the age of 79. He is buried in Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey.
Richardson had two sisters: Elizabeth Mary Dixon Richardson, who married the prominent mathematician Oswald Veblen; and Charlotte Sara Richardson, who married the American physicist (and 1937 Nobel laureate in Physics) Clinton Davisson, who was Richardson's Ph.D. student at Princeton. After Lilian's death in 1945, he was remarried in 1948 to Henriette Rupp, a physicist.
Richardson had a son, Harold Owen Richardson, who specialised in nuclear physics and was also the chairman of the Physics Department at Bedford College, London University, and later on became emeritus professor at London University.
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