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Chaos theory (or chaology [1]) is an interdisciplinary area of scientific study and branch of mathematics. It focuses on underlying patterns and deterministic laws of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions. These were once thought to have completely random states of disorder and irregularities. [2]
Butterfly effect image. The butterfly effect describes a phenomenon in chaos theory whereby a minor change in circumstances can cause a large change in outcome. The scientific concept is attributed to Edward Lorenz, a mathematician and meteorologist who used the metaphor to describe his research findings related to chaos theory and weather prediction, [1] [2] initially in a 1972 paper titled ...
In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state. The term is closely associated with the work of the mathematician and meteorologist Edward Norton Lorenz.
Chaos theory explains how complex systems work in multiple fields, including astrophysics, climate change, and neuroscience. Chaos doesn’t always mean systems are totally unpredictable .
Lorenz was born in 1917 in West Hartford, Connecticut. [5] He acquired an early love of science from both sides of his family. His father, Edward Henry Lorenz (1882-1956), majored in mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his maternal grandfather, Lewis M. Norton, developed the first course in chemical engineering at MIT in 1888.
The nature of chaos theory suggests that the predictability of any system is limited because it is impossible to know all of the minutiae of a system at the present time. In principle, the deterministic systems that chaos theory attempts to analyze can be predicted, but uncertainty in a forecast increases exponentially with elapsed time. [2]
By comparison, based on the concept of attractor coexistence within the generalized Lorenz model [26] and the original Lorenz model ([36] [37]), Shen and his co-authors [35] [38] proposed a revised view that “weather possesses both chaos and order with distinct predictability”. The revised view, which is a build-up of the conventional view ...
Chaos theory discusses self-organization in terms of islands of predictability in a sea of chaotic unpredictability. Self-organization occurs in many physical , chemical , biological , robotic , and cognitive systems.