| Edward Norton Lorenz | |
Edward Norton Lorenz
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| Born | May 23, 1917 West Hartford, Connecticut, United States |
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| Died | April 16, 2008 (aged 90) Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States |
| Residence | United States |
| Fields | Mathematics and Meteorology |
| Institutions | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| Alma mater | Dartmouth College Harvard University Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| Doctoral advisor | James Murdoch Austin |
| Doctoral students | Kevin E. Trenberth |
| Known for | Chaos theory Lorenz attractor Butterfly effect |
| Notable awards | Kyoto Prize (1991) |
Edward Norton Lorenz (May 23, 1917 - April 16, 2008) was an American mathematician and meteorologist, and a pioneer of chaos theory. He discovered the strange attractor notion and coined the term butterfly effect.
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Lorenz was born in West Hartford, Connecticut.[1] 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. Lorenz earned two degrees in the area from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he later was a professor for many years. He was a Professor Emeritus at MIT from 1981 until his death.
Lorenz continued to be active in his work well into his seventies, winning the Kyoto Prize for basic sciences, in the field of earth and planetary sciences, in 1991.[2] In his later years, he lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was an avid outdoorsman, who enjoyed hiking, climbing, and cross-country skiing. He kept up with these pursuits until very late in his life, and managed to continue most of his regular activities until only a few weeks before his death. According to his daughter, Cheryl Lorenz, Lorenz had "finished a paper a week ago with a colleague."[3] On April 16, 2008, Lorenz died at his home in Cambridge at the age of 90, having suffered from cancer. [4]
He was awarded the Kyoto Prize in 1991 and cited for "profoundly influencing a wide range of basic sciences and brought about one of the most dramatic changes in mankind’s view of nature since Sir Isaac Newton."[5] Lorenz has received many awards for his work, including:
Lorenz built a mathematical model of the way air moves around in the atmosphere. As Lorenz studied weather patterns he began to realize that they did not always change as predicted. Minute variations in the initial values of variables in his twelve variable 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.[6]
Lorenz went on to explore the underlying mathematics and published his conclusions in a seminal work titled Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow, in which he described a relatively simple system of equations that resulted in a very complicated dynamical object now known as the Lorenz attractor.
Lorenz published several books and articles. A selection:
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