A native of New York City, Richter was born into a Jewish family in Brooklyn, and was raised in the Queens neighborhood of Far Rockaway. His parents were Fanny (Pollack) and Abraham Richter, a textile worker. He graduated from Far Rockaway High School, a school that also produced fellow laureates Baruch Samuel Blumberg and Richard Feynman. He attended Mercersburg Academy in Pennsylvania, then continued on to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received his bachelor's degree in 1952 and his PhD in 1956. He was Director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) from 1984 to 1999.
As a professor at Stanford University, Richter built a particle accelerator called SPEAR (Stanford Positron-Electron Asymmetric Ring) with the help of David Ritson and the support of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. With it he led a team that discovered a new subatomic particle he called a ψ (psi). This discovery was also made by the team led by Samuel Ting at Brookhaven National Laboratory, but he called the particle J. The particle thus became known as the J/ψ meson. Richter and Ting were jointly awarded the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work.
In May 2007, he visited Iran and Sharif University of Technology.
In 2012, President Barack Obama announced that Burton Richter was a co-recipient of the Enrico Fermi Award, along with Mildred Dresselhaus.
In 2013, Richter commented on an open letter from Tom Wigley, Kerry Emanuel, Ken Caldeira, and James Hansen, that Angela Merkel was "wrong to shut down nuclear".
In 2014, Richter was among the residents of a continuing care retirement center filing a lawsuit alleging refundable entrance fees were sent out of state. This may be the first legal complaint challenging a continuing care retirement home's financial practices. At a hearing on September 9, 2014 in Federal Court, attorneys allege Richter read the contracts, saw significant problems, and is entitled to pursue a legal judgement concerning the use of his money.
