Ed Lorenz: Father of the ‘Butterfly Effect’

Abstract

Ed Lorenz, rightfully acclaimed as the father of the ‘Butterfly Effect’, was an American mathematician and meteorologist whose early work on weather prediction convinced the world at large about the unpredictability of weather. His seminal work on a simplified model for convections in the atmosphere led to the modern theory of ‘Chaos’–the third revolutionary discovery of 20th century, the other two being relativity and quantum physics. The possibility of unpredictability in certain nonlinear systems was vaguely mentioned earlier by J C Maxwell and clearly asserted later by H Poincaré. But it was the work of Lorenz in 1963 that indicated clearly that the sensitive dependence on the initial conditions (also called ‘SIC’-ness) of such systems can lead to unpredictable states. This strange and exotic behavior was named the ‘Butterfly Effect1’ by him in a lecture that he delivered in December 1972 in Washington DC.