Edward Norton Lorenz is an American mathematician and meteorologist, and a contributor to the chaos theory and inventor of the strange attractor notion. He coined the term butterfly effect.

Life

Edward Norton Lorenz was born in West Haven, Connecticut, on May 23, 1917. He studied mathematics at both Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

During World War II, he served as a weather forecaster for the United States Army Air Corps.

After his return from the war, he decided to study meteorology, in which he earned two degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he later was a professor for many years.

Professor Emeritus at the MIT since 1981, Lorenz has received many awards for his work, among which:

• 1969 Carl Gustaf Rossby Research Medal, American Meteorological Society.
• 1973 Symons Memorial Gold Medal, Royal Mateorological Society.
• 1975 Fellow, National Academy of Sciences (U.S.A.).
• 1981 Member, Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.
• 1983 Crafoord Prize, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
• 1984 Honorary Member, Royal Mateorological Society.
• 1991 Kyoto Prize for ‘… his boldest scientific achievement in discovering "deterministic chaos" .’.
• 2004 12 May Buys Ballot medal.

Work

Lorenz studied the way air moves around in the atmosphere, for which he build a mathematical model.

As Lorenz studied weather patterns more closely, he began to realize that the weather did not always change as predicted; observed that minute variations in the initial values of variables in his primitive 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.

Lorenz went on to explore the underlying mathematics and published his conclusions in a seminal work in titled Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow, in which he described a relatively simple system of equations that resulted in a pattern of infinite complexity, the Lorenz attractor.

Publications

• 1955 Available potential energy and the maintenance of the general circulation. Tellus. Vol.7
• 1963 Deterministic nonperiodic flow. Journal of Atmospheric Sciences. Vol.20 : 130—141.
• 1967 The nature and theory of the general circulation of atmosphere. World Meteorological Organization. No.218
• 1969 Three approaches to atmospheric predictability. Bull. American Meteorological Society. Vol.50
• 1976 Nondeterministic theories of climate change. Quaternary Research. Vol.6
• 1990 Can chaos and intransitivity lead to interannual variability? Tellus. Vol.42A