Edward Lorenz, the father of “chaos theory” died in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the ripe-old age of 90. “Chaos theory” is more commonly understood as the butterfly effect. No, not the surprisingly-not-that-crappy movie starring Ashton Kutcher, though we can “thank” Lorenz for inspiring the title. The butterfly effect states that something as minuscule as a butterfly flapping its wings could trigger hurricanes on the other side of the world. The idea of small changes causing big changes seems simple, but it proved to be amazingly important for a variety of fields.

While a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ran two of the same computations in a computer and came up with vastly different answers. When he double checked his work he realized that one computation featured a number that differed by less than 0.0001, but was different enough to produce a vastly different answer. Through that error he wrote a scientific paper that developed chaos theory and the butterfly effect.

Meteorologists base their forecasts on the techniques developed by Lorenz. Knowing how badly off weathermen can be, we can’t help but wonder just how bad they were before Lorenz. Apparently other fields and basic sciences benefited more than meteorology.

R.I.P Edward Lorenz 1917 – 2008.

[CNN]

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