Wavepacket Blog displaying only one specific post |
| 2008 | |
| April | |
| Thu Apr 17 20:00:52 2008 Edward Lorenz, 1917 - 2008 |
|
| >> links >> | |
| Thu Apr 17 20:00:52 2008 Edward Lorenz, 1917 - 2008 Founder of Chaos Theory. |
|
| Edward Lorenz died yesterday. You can also see his bio on wikipedia. That entry notes he "brought about one of the most dramatic changes in mankind's view of nature since Sir Isaac Newton." That's an amazing comparison! But it may be a fair one. Chaos theory shook up how people (and mathematicians) modeled and thought about systems. Uncertainty and unpredictability were put at center stage, and to some extent explained. I had heard of Lorenz's work mostly through the great book Chaos, which is well worth a look if you haven't already read it. One of the things I found fascinating was that Lorenz did all of this great mathematical work while constructing models of the weather. Later, as mathematicians were exploring chaos theory, they were shocked to discover Lorenz's seminal papers in journals like "American Meteorologist Monthly." As part of modeling the weather, he noticed (by accident) that he'd get wildly different weather patterns if the starting conditions for his simulation were even slightly different. This was later coined as the butterfly effect, which has to be one of the most over-used (and poorly understood) scientific metaphors in popular culture. As a grad student working on my own simulations of semiconductor systems (which were also chaotic!) I definitely ran into this effect. Chaos theory has been helpful to describe multiple systems I've worked in, from semiconductors to distributed systems to markets. Comments |
Related: mathematics Unrelated: books economics energy environment geopolitics lists predictions science |
| Links: |  |
Blog Directory | Blog Blog | Technorati Profile | Strange Attractor |