“One flap of a butterfly’s wings could change the course of weather forever.”
The catchphrase of one of the pioneers of Chaos Theory, Edward Lorenz, a mathematician and meteorologist whose birthday is celebrated on 23rd May.
In the 1960s Lorenz built a mathematical model of the way air moves in the atmosphere and tried to use the data from this to predict weather patterns, which he realized did not always change as predicted. Small changes in variables placed in a computer created widely different weather patterns, and hence the term the ‘butterfly effect’ came into use.
Lorenz went on to study the mathematical system of equations involved, which resulted in a graph of a very complicated dynamical object called the ‘Lorenz attractor’.
