Lorenz Attractor

The Lorenz attractor is the strange attractor that arises from the Lorenz system, a set of three ordinary differential equations first developed by the meteorologist Edward Lorenz in 1963 while modeling atmospheric convection. Solutions to the system are extremely sensitive to their initial conditions, so that two nearly identical starting states diverge into unpredictable long-term behavior despite the equations themselves being fully deterministic, a property that inspired the popular image of the butterfly effect. Plotted in three dimensions, trajectories trace out a bounded, non-repeating, butterfly-shaped surface, the Lorenz attractor itself, one of the first strange attractors studied in detail and a founding example of deterministic chaos. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/