Richard Buckingham

Richard Arthur Buckingham FBCS FRSA (17 July 1911 – 13 August 1994) was an English mathematician and computer scientist, Professor of Computing Science and later of Computer Education in the University of London and Director of the Institute of Computer Science.

He was also a Fellow of the British Computer Society and of the Royal Society of Arts and chaired the Technical Committee for Education (TC3) of the International Federation for Information Processing. He was also the originator of the Buckingham potential formula.

Buckingham was the son of George Herbert Buckingham, by his marriage to Alice Mary Watson King. He was educated at Gresham's School, Holt, and St John's College, Cambridge.

After Cambridge, Buckingham's first academic post was at Queen's University, Belfast, where he was an assistant lecturer in Mathematical Physics from 1935 to 1938. In 1938 he published a paper titled 'The classical equation of state of gaseous Helium, Neon and Argon', which proposed a formula which became known as the Buckingham potential. The same year, he took up a new post as Senior 1851 Exhibitioner at University College, London, before serving in the Royal Navy's Admiralty Research Laboratory, Teddington, and in the Mine Design Department at Havant, from 1940 to 1945. After the Second World War, he became an academic of University College London, where he was a Lecturer in Mathematics (1945–1950), a Lecturer in Physics (1950–1951), and a Reader in Physics (1951–1957). From 1957 to 1973 he was Director of the University of London's Computer Unit, which during his tenure was renamed as the Institute of Computer Science.

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