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Prof. Emeritus Edward Lorenz
M.I.T.
Edward Lorenz is Professor Emeritus of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He received his B.A. from Dartmouth College in 1938 and his M.A. from Harvard in 1940, both in Mathematics. He received his M.S. in 1943 and Sc.D. in 1948, both from M.I.T. in Meteorology, becoming professor at M.I.T. in 1955. He has received honorary degrees from seven universities. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Meteorological Society (AMS), the National Academy of Sciences, Indian Academy of Sciences, Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, and the Royal Meteorological Society (RMS). He has won the Clarence Leroy Meisinger Award from the AMS, the Carl-Gustaf Rossby Research Medal from the AMS, the Symons Memorial Gold Medal from the RMS, the Holger and Anna-Greta Crafoord Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Science, the Elliott Creson Medal from the Franklin Institute, the Kyoto Prize from the Inamori Foundation, the Roger Revelle Medal from the American Geophysical Union, the Louis J. Battan Author's Award from the AMS, I.M.O. Prize from the World Meteorological Organization, and the Buys Ballot Medal from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
His research in the 1950s initially focused on the general circulation of the atmosphere, but transitioned to simplified governing equations for the atmosphere. It was working on a particular set of simplified equations that he discovered imperceptable changes in the initial conditions could produce drastically divergent solutions, a concept we now call chaos. This sensitive dependence to the initial conditions was described in his foundational 1963 paper, "Deterministic nonperiodic flow." According to the ISI Web of Science, Lorenz (1963) has been cited in the scientific literature over 3700 times. This equation set and the attractors described by this equation set have been called the Lorenz equations and Lorenz attractors, respectively. His later work has defined the predictability limits of the atmosphere through observations and state-of-the-art numerical weather prediction models. His 1972 talk at the American Association for the Advancement of Science entitled "Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil Set off a Tornado in Texas?" coined the term "butterfly effect," which is now the popular description for chaos. In 1993, he published a book based on his Jessie and John Danz lectures at the University of Washington entitled "The Essence of Chaos." He has published over 70 scientific papers, including two in 2005 entitled "Designing Chaotic Models" (Journal of Atmospheric Sciences) and "A Look at Some Details of the Growth of Initial Uncertainties" (Tellus) at the age of 88 years. More about chaos theory.
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