Richard Börnstein was a German physicist and meteorologist.

Born into a Jewish family in Königsberg, he studied natural sciences at the University of Göttingen, and later on, worked as an assistant to Georg Hermann Quincke at the University of Heidelberg. In 1877 he obtained his habilitation at Heidelberg, and afterwards taught classes in experimental physics and meteorology at the Agricultural Academy in Proskau. From 1881 onward, he served as a professor at the Agricultural University of Berlin.

At the university in Berlin he established a meteorological station. He is also credited with the development of a pressure anemometer (1883) and making improvements in regards to rain gauge methodology. In 1883, with chemist Hans Heinrich Landolt, he published the first edition of the Physikalisch-Chemische Tabellen (now referred to as the "Landolt-Börnstein"; it contains more than 400 volumes of data from all areas of the physical sciences). He died in Berlin, aged 61.