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.'"

Re:Died of cancer... but why?

[dreamchaser]

You might get modded troll or flamebait by the people who didn't understand your subtle reference. It could have been a butterfly taking off in New Mexico though. We aren't quite sure.

A great man whose contributions will be remembered for centuries to come has passed. I think I'm going to fire up a fractal generator and play with Lorenz Attractors now.

Overrated

[2.7182]

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.

Re:Overrated

[2.7182]

OK, this is going to get some people pissed, but it is my honest opinion and I am not doing this to troll. There are a lot of scientific areas that are promoted to get peoples careers going. In fact, they are largely vaporware. Here are some examples:

1. Robotics. Most of academic robotics is pretty lame. The good people go into industry. Consider for example Michael Raibert and Big Dog. (Look on youtube.) This guy is a true genius, so he left MIT. Most robotics that you see in the media are really bad. Like Alan Alda talking to a robot that "has emotions".

2. Wavelets. First of all, was invented a long time ago. Its just another choice of basis. Not clear if they are the best for compression or denoising. Look closely and you will see that classical harmonic analysis provides a good competing answer. Jpeg2000 may be better than jpg but not clear if it is due to the use of wavelets, or because of the fact that they had like 40 people working on the lossless coding scheme, which is an ad hoc heuristic. And besides, how many of us are using jpg2000 ? Finally, people I know that work in it say "I just use the haar basis". Haar found this basis in something like 1912.

3. Chaos. By definition hard to appy to experimental science. As mention the mathematical theory is super hard. McMullen won a Fields medal for it. Work by Sullivan and Duordy is awesome, but they aren't claiming to connect it to experiments.

4. Catastrophe theory. This was the 60s and 70s version of wavelets. Hardly mentioned in the media anyone, and mostly the people who work on it are pure mathematicians.

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 ?

6. Computer vision. A total mess. They don't even read each others papers and are busy reproducing each other's work, with tends to be some hacks that work only in limited conditions. Remember the MIT face recognition program after 9/11 that was at the Statue of Liberty ? They failed it!

"flow "- not form fluid dynamics

[S3D]

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 [wikipedia.org] - that is solution of the differential equation on the curved surface. It's studied by specific branches of mathematics - Differential (topological) dynamics [wikipedia.org], which in big parts owes its origination to the Lorentz paper. So the title of the paper really mean "Deterministic Nonperiodic Solutions"

Re:Overrated

[protobion]

OK, this is going to get some people pissed, but it is my honest opinion and I am not doing this to troll. There are a lot of scientific areas that are promoted to get peoples careers going. In fact, they are largely vaporware. Here are some examples:

1. Robotics. Most of academic robotics is pretty lame. The good people go into industry. Consider for example Michael Raibert and Big Dog. (Look on youtube.) This guy is a true genius, so he left MIT. Most robotics that you see in the media are really bad. Like Alan Alda talking to a robot that "has emotions".

2. Wavelets. First of all, was invented a long time ago. Its just another choice of basis. Not clear if they are the best for compression or denoising. Look closely and you will see that classical harmonic analysis provides a good competing answer. Jpeg2000 may be better than jpg but not clear if it is due to the use of wavelets, or because of the fact that they had like 40 people working on the lossless coding scheme, which is an ad hoc heuristic. And besides, how many of us are using jpg2000 ? Finally, people I know that work in it say "I just use the haar basis". Haar found this basis in something like 1912.

3. Chaos. By definition hard to appy to experimental science. As mention the mathematical theory is super hard. McMullen won a Fields medal for it. Work by Sullivan and Duordy is awesome, but they aren't claiming to connect it to experiments.

4. Catastrophe theory. This was the 60s and 70s version of wavelets. Hardly mentioned in the media anyone, and mostly the people who work on it are pure mathematicians.

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 ?

6. Computer vision. A total mess. They don't even read each others papers and are busy reproducing each other's work, with tends to be some hacks that work only in limited conditions. Remember the MIT face recognition program after 9/11 that was at the Statue of Liberty ? They failed it!

And I trust you speak of this from your expertise in every one of those fields ?

I'll talk about only what I know. In biology, from eco-systems to cellular processes, one sees a lot of non-linear dynamics, many of those appearing to conform to chaos theory. Chaos theory is beleived to be the closest thing we have to explaining those phenomenon. And yes, it is challenging.

An experiment

[Coppit]

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.

Re:Father of chaos theory?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, they discovered chaotic systems but did not identify chaos theory. Their discoveries are analogous to Kepler's equations of planetary motion versus Newton's formal theory of gravity. Or Faraday's studies of the electric and magnetic fields versus Maxwell's formal electrodynamic theory. Hadamard, Lyapunov, and Poincaré made great contributions, but they did not found chaos theory. They observed individual problems but failed to piece it together in the more general mathematical theory. I don't fault any of them. Nonlinear dynamics was only in its infancy during their lives.

Re:Overrated

[jmichaelg]

it is controversial that chaos will ever contribute to science in any way.

I agree that a lot of chaos work produced not much more than chaos. But sometimes a paper can tell you what results to discard out of hand and that in itself is a contribution. From his seminal 1963 paper [allenpress.com],

When our results concerning the instability of nonperiodic flow are applied to the atmosphere, which is ostensibly non-periodic, they indicate that that prediction of the distant sufficiently distant future is impossible by any method, unless the present conditions are known exactly.

 

Fractint

[Alarindris]

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/ [fractint.org]