Edward Norton Lorenz

Edward Norton Lorenz was an American mathematician and meteorologist, born in 1917 in West Hartford, Connecticut, and died in 2008 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He established the theoretical basis for understanding the predictability of weather and climate and helped found the use of computers in atmospheric physics and meteorology. Lorenz founded modern chaos theory, the branch of mathematics studying dynamical systems whose behavior is highly sensitive to small differences in initial conditions, a discovery that grew out of his own numerical weather models and became known popularly as the butterfly effect.