Edward Norton Lorenz

Edward Norton Lorenz (1917 to 2008) was an American mathematician and meteorologist who founded modern chaos theory. Born in West Hartford, Connecticut, he studied mathematics at Dartmouth and Harvard, served as a weather forecaster for the United States Army Air Forces in the Second World War, and took his doctorate in meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1948. He spent his whole scientific career at MIT. While running weather simulations on an early digital computer in 1961 he found that tiny rounding differences in the starting values produced very different long-term results, the discovery of deterministic chaos set out in his 1963 paper Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow and later popularised as the butterfly effect. His work gave its name to the Lorenz attractor. His honours include the Crafoord Prize in 1983 and the Kyoto Prize in 1991.