Charles Francis Richter
Seismologist and mathematician · United States · Academics · Lived 1900 to 1985 · aged 85
Charles Francis Richter is read about 133 times a day, in 63 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 16 September 2026
The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 60 days, one point a day.
Something wrong?The scale that carried his name became shorthand for disaster itself - newsrooms and dinner tables alike measured catastrophe in Richter numbers for half a century.
Also in Deutsch
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About this person
Charles Francis Richter was an American seismologist and physicist who spent his career at the California Institute of Technology. Inspired by Kiyoo Wadati's 1928 paper on shallow and deep earthquakes, he developed a logarithmic scale in collaboration with Beno Gutenberg and first used it in 1935. The Richter scale became the dominant tool for quantifying earthquake size worldwide until the moment magnitude scale replaced it in 1979. He died September 30, 1985, forty-four years after the scale made his surname a unit of measure.
Academics from the United States 6
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