Roger Wolcott Richardson (30 May 1930 – 15 June 1993) was a mathematician noted for his work in representation theory and geometry. He was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and educated at Louisiana State University, Harvard University and University of Michigan, Ann Arbor where he obtained a Ph.D. under the supervision of Hans Samelson. He emigrated in 1970, and subsequently worked in the United Kingdom and Australia.
Richardson’s best known result states that if P is a parabolic subgroup of a reductive group, then P has a dense orbit on its nilradical, i.e., one whose closure is the whole space[1]. This orbit is now universally known as the Richardson orbit [2].