I was born on 22 March 1931 in New York, the elder child of Abraham and Fanny Richter.

With it he led a team that discovered a new subatomic particle he called a ψ (psi). In May 2007 he visited Iran and Sharif University of Technology. Richter and Ting were jointly awarded the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work.

This discovery was part of the so-called November Revolution of particle physics. He led the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) team which co-discovered the J/ψ meson in 1974 alongside the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) team led by Samuel Ting.