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.
Similar content being viewed by others
Suggested Reading
T N Palmer, Edward Norton Lorenz, 23 May 1917–16 April 2008 Biogr. Mems. Fell. R. Soc., 55, 2009.
Father of Chaos: The Life and Times of Ed Lorenz, on MIT’s Tech TV.
J Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science, Heinemann, London, 1987
V K Wadhawan, Complex systems: An introduction–information theory, chaos theory and computational complexity, Resonance, Vol.14, No.8, pp.761–781, 2009.
E N Lorenz, Deterministic nonperiodic flow, Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, Vol.20, pp.130–141, 1963.
E N Lorenz, The Essence of Chaos, University of Washington Press, 1993.
R C Hilborn, Chaos and Nonlinear Dynamics, Oxford University Press, 1994
E N Lorenz, A Scientist by Choice–http://web.mit.edu/lorenzcenter/about/LorenzPubs/
B Mandelbrot, The Fractal Geometry of Nature, W H Freeman, New York 1982.
T S K V Iyer, Balakrishnan Ramasamy and P Varadharajan, Fractals: A new geometry of nature, Resonance, Vol.2, No.10, pp.62–68, 1997.
Shailesh A Shirali, Fractal dimension and the Cantor set, Resonance, Vol.19, No.11, pp.1000–1004, 2014.
C Sparrow, The Lorenz Equations: Bifurcations, Chaos, and Strange Attractors, Springer, New York, 1982.
A Argyris, D Syvridis, L Larger, V Annovazzi-Lodi, P Colet, I Fischer, J Garcia-Ojalvo, C R Mirasso, L Pesquera and K A Shore, Chaos-based communications at high bit rates using commercial fibre-optic links, Nature, 438, Letters 04375, pp.343–346, 2005.
E Motter and D K Campbell, Chaos at fifty, Physics Today, Vol.66, No.5, p.27, 2013
Fifty Years of Chaos: Applied and Theoretical, Special Issue, Chaos, Vol.22, No.4, 2012.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
G Ambika is Professor of Physics and Dean of Graduate Studies at IISER, Pune. Her research interests are in understanding complex systems using networks and time series analysis and also study and control of emergent dynamics and pattern formation in complex systems.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Ambika, G. Ed Lorenz: Father of the ‘Butterfly Effect’. Reson 20, 198–205 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12045-015-0170-y
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12045-015-0170-y