Mr. Edward N. Lorenz, Father of Chaos Theory, Dies at 90.
Edward Norton Lorenz was an American mathematician and meteorologist, and an early pioneer of the chaos theory. He discovered the strange attractor notion and coined the term butterfly effect.
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Lorenz built a mathematical model of the way air moves around in the atmosphere. As Lorenz studied weather patterns he began to realize that the they did not always change as predicted. Minute variations in the initial values of variables in his twelve variable computer weather model (c. 1960) would result in grossly divergent weather patterns. This sensitive dependence on initial conditions came to be known as the butterfly effect.[3]
Lorenz went on to explore the underlying mathematics and published his conclusions in a seminal work titled Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow, in which he described a relatively simple system of equations that resulted in a pattern of infinite complexity now known as the Lorenz attractor.
