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Edward Lorenz, Father of Chaos Theory, Dies at 90
An anonymous reader writes "Professor Edward N. Lorenz, who discovered in 1961 that subtle changes in the initial conditions of a weather simulation program could cause very large differences in its results, died of cancer Wednesday at the age of 90. The contributions of the father of chaos theory, who coined the term 'the butterfly effect' and also discovered the Lorenz Attractor, are best summarized by the wording of the Kyoto Prize in 1991 which noted that his discovery of chaos theory 'profoundly influenced 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.'"
Why aren't they reporting that his cancer was caused by a zebra sneezing in the UK last fall under a fig tree. It seems quite relevant.
...and also one that's fun to play with (needs java).
How come this news gets on ./ so late ??
I don't like toot my own horn but I've studied chaos theory and made some significant findings over the years.
My best work has been realised over a night of heavy intoxication especially between 18 and 23 years of age. This work requires a lot of effort and is usually conducted on Friday and Saturday nights. I can't believe just how many gifted mathematicians there is over these nights. So much research, so many beers.
However these days I'm a bit more relaxed and allow the the younger crowds to take over.
He got his geography wrong. Butterflies in Brazil do not lead to hurricanes in Texas. As you can see on this graphic on this page, there is practically no hurricane activity in the South Atlantic.
Most hurricanes that would hit Texas all originate as storms over West Africa.
I wonder why Lorenz didn't use Africa in the title of his paper instead of Brazil.
Hasan
Its controversial that he was the first. A lot of people worked on this area. In fact, it is controversial that chaos will ever contribute to science in any way. The pure mathematical theory is very hard. See the work by Curt McMullen for example. Many people I know are very skeptical, and there are a lot of bad papers purporting to use chaos theory.
Back in my college days, I visited the library and looked up Lorenz's paper, "Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow." On the face of it, the presentation was not particularly striking, nor did it seem significant on a superficial reading. That it was buried in a meteorology journal, rather than a mathematics or physics journal, only further obscured its importance.
Lorenz's discovery was not so much about the specific nonlinear differential system (now named after him) that he discussed in the paper, nor was it about chaos theory as we now know it. The significance lay entirely in the notion that even simple dynamical systems can display sensitive dependence on initial conditions, and that when extrapolated to real-world phenomena, the intrinsic complexity of their behavior was all but inevitable.
A chaotic system is not merely disordered, or random. There is an underlying structure. Call it a kind of orderly disorder. Prior to (and indeed, for some time after) Lorenz's work, physicists largely dismissed this possibility as absurd. We can, in such a system, model its state at some infinitesimal time t+dt after some given state at time t. We can do this quite accurately. But as Lorenz showed, the deterministic property is insufficient to imply that one can know the state of the system at any arbitrary time in the future. There is a difference between knowing how the future is calculated from the past, versus knowing what the future will actually be.
Hence the chosen title. "Deterministic" = future states are well-defined from a known prior state. "Nonperiodic" = does not display cyclical behavior. "Flow" = fluid dynamics, in Lorenz's case, atmospheric convection.
He is truly missed.
I guess entropy got the best of him...
WAY TO ROCK THAT OLD NEWS!
Andy
Errors add up.
Evidently dying on Weds does not result in a Slashdot post until Sunday? That is one slow effect...
no comment
1. It was the academic robotics teams that did well in the 2005 DARPA grand challenge (the top finishers were from Stanford and Carnegie-Mellon). Note that this also incorporated your #6, computer vision.
5. AI continues to improve at a steady pace. It's not that "nothing ever happened". For example, the DARPA Grand Challenge was won and Kasparov was beaten by Deep Blue. I think you might be referring to "strong AI" which we won't get until about 2030 because computers simply won't be fast enough until then.
I think if anything, people aren't realizing how quickly technology is advancing. This is the nature of exponential growth. I'm sure people will be dismissing AI and robotic research right up to when everything changes, seemingly out of the blue to most people.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Its a leaf in the forest.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Flow in the title of Lorentz paper is not a flow from fluid dynamics or physics. It's a purely mathematical term which mean a solution of differential equation (Lorentz equation in the case). In more general sense flow is a group action of R on the manifold - that is solution of the differential equation on the curved surface. It's studied by specific branches of mathematics - Differential (topological) dynamics, which in big parts owes its origination to the Lorentz paper. So the title of the paper really mean "Deterministic Nonperiodic Solutions"
Rest in peace, Edward Lorenz. The world will be a little more chaotic without you. Or maybe less. I can't predict which.
his death will cause the universe to explode. wow.
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I do not want to belittle Lorenz' major contribution to chaos theory, but the concept (if not the word) of chaos had long been fairly well grasped by Poincaré (1890) and Hadamard (1898).
Doesn't anybody see the irony here?
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Here's a simple chaos experiment you can do at home... Turn on a faucet slightly so that it drips regularly. Then increment the flow slightly, and pretty soon the drips will come out in a non-regular way. Understanding the transition from regular to irregular is part of what chaos theory is about.
and constructs is that you don't think they are useful for decades or even centuries, and then, one fine day, the next big thing of the day is based on one of these "languishing, useless" constructs, combined with somthing else that is recently (at the time) discovered or invented.
These theories _last_.
They wait patiently for society to evolve to the point of using them in practice.
Disclaimer 1: IANAM (mahematician).
Disclaimer 2: does not apply to all works.
Hackers have long memories. It works both ways.
"5. Artificial intelligence. Goedel Escher Bach had our hopes up. But nothing ever happened. It' too hard. People claim breakthoughs all the time, but wheres the beef ?"
You sound like you're a hook line and sinker victim of the AI effect. I'm no expert in the other areas you mention, but in terms of AI you truly don't seem to understand the subject at all. There are plenty of examples out there of fields where AI has been extremely successful and are used on a daily basis - data mining, medical diagnosis, spam filtering to name a few examples. I can only guess that you're living under some false expectation of strong AI anytime soon, whilst the possibilities of AI were overhyped for a long time, it's now also nearly been equally long accepted that we simply don't have the understanding or the computing power to produce strong AI quite just yet.
But i invented the Chaos Theory, if you don't belive me come have a look at my room!
(Chapta: Nonsense)
I saw a program on the Mandelbrot set and Lorenz attractor on PBS in the late 80's. Completely changed the way I thought about the world. Also where I discovered Fractint.
http://www.fractint.org/
Famous scientists around their 90's are dieing lately.
-Nemo me impune lacessit-
There once was a man named Fisk whose thrust of the sword was so brisk that with the speed of the action the Lorentz-Fitzgerald Contraction reduced his rapier to a disk!
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
What is your Erdos-Bacon number?
... was ruled to be completely random.
So.
Farewell then, Ed Lorenz.
You have
in a way
reached a steady state,
that is to say
a point attractor
with cycle zero.
Now you can say hello to Shrödinger.
And stroke his cat.
If it's dead, that is.
(Age 17 1/2)
Chaos: The Making of a New Science. Tells the entire story of Lorentz's discovery, in gory detail, down to the fact that he used a Royal McBee computer to do his original weather simulation, the same computer in the famous hacker "Story of Mel".
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Chaos is a process or descending down paths probabilities, not a result.
Quantum theory and the indeterminacy of states means that the actual state of a system has to be known, it cannot be calculated.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Whoa, talk about a coincidence.
If a butterfly can cause a hurricane, what can an entire air corridor of passenger liners do?
Did we notice a change in the weather in the days after 9/11 when the planes were grounded?
Has the last few decades of jet air travel caused the weather system to adapt such that reducing the number of flights (like 800 jets grounded for safety inspections) have a greater effect than leaving them flying?
Could the rapid swings in weather, (higher highs/lower lows) be caused by the aircraft Giga-Butterfly Effect (aka the Mothra Effect) more than a climate warming effect?
What effect would a nuclear detonation have?
How much effect does war in Iraq have?
Maybe the Chinese should ask for a moratorium on war in Iraq during the Olympics... or whatever the Butterfly Interval is.
I mean, seriously... cancer? At age 90? How predictable...
I just wish he could have had a "Final Destination" style death...
...if he doesn't die next year at the same time, we can finally be sure he was on to something. :)
Please stop stalking me, bro.
I got a first class example of this in my game, where I have dumb bots following simple paths with nodes. That's all they do, follow paths. But in the engine they are subject to the vagueries of the physics and sim system. I have long noticed how even the slightest change in initial orientation or inertia can have wildly significant effects on the precise paths the bots take, or whether they can complete them at all. The system, in fact, is sufficiently complex, that even background processes on the game server can effect the timing of some moves, and thus the paths.
Needless to say, debugging could be unpleasant.
expandfairuse.org
OffTopic Snobbery:
He dies at 90? Is that because it is going to happen in the future? "The train arrives at noon." Or is it dies habitually? "Tony Hawk skates."
It seems more likely that "Lorenz died at the age of 90". Or "Lorenz is dead at age 90".
Do people go stupid when someone dies and forget verb tense because they are so wracked with grief for a stranger?
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