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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]
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]
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.
The Origins of Chaos Theory. While Lorenz might be known for coining the “Butterfly Effect” in relation to chaos theory, Lin says that the discovery of chaos theory actually dates back to the ...
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.
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 ...
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 ...
In lab experiments that study chaos theory, approaches designed to control chaos are based on certain observed system behaviors. Any chaotic attractor contains an infinite number of unstable, periodic orbits. Chaotic dynamics, then, consists of a motion where the system state moves in the neighborhood of one of these orbits for a while, then ...