Edward Norton Lorenz

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Edward Norton Lorenz bigraphy, stories - American mathematician and meteorologist

Edward Norton Lorenz : biography

23 May 1917 – 16 April 2008

Edward Norton Lorenz (May 23, 1917 – April 16, 2008)

was an American mathematician and meteorologist, and a pioneer of chaos theory.Motter A. E. and Campbell D. K. (2013). , Phys. Today 66(5), 27-33. He discovered the strange attractor notion and coined the term butterfly effect. 

Biography

Lorenz was born in West Hartford, Connecticut.

He studied mathematics at both Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. From 1942 until 1946, he served as a meteorologist for the United States Army Air Corps. After his return from World War II, he decided to study meteorology. Lorenz earned two degrees in the area from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he later was a professor for many years. He was a Professor Emeritus at MIT from 1969 until his death. 

During the 1950s, Lorenz became skeptical of the appropriateness of the linear statistical models in meteorology, as most atmospheric phenomena involved in weather forecasting are non-linear. His work on the topic culminated in the publication of his 1963 paper Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow in Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, and with it, the foundation of chaos theory.

His description of the butterfly effect followed in 1969,. 

He was awarded the Kyoto Prize for basic sciences, in the field of earth and planetary sciences, in 1991,, the Buys Ballot Award in 2004, and the Tomassoni Award in 2008. In his later years, he lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was an avid outdoorsman, who enjoyed hiking, climbing, and cross-country skiing. He kept up with these pursuits until very late in his life, and managed to continue most of his regular activities until only a few weeks before his death. According to his daughter, Cheryl Lorenz, Lorenz had "finished a paper a week ago with a colleague."

On April 16, 2008, Lorenz died at his home in Cambridge at the age of 90, having suffered from cancer. 

Work

Lorenz built a mathematical model of the way air moves around in the atmosphere. As Lorenz studied weather patterns he began to realize that they did not always change as predicted. Minute variations in the initial values of variables in his twelve-variable computer weather model (c. 1960) would result in grossly divergent weather patterns. This sensitive dependence on initial conditions came to be known as the butterfly effect (it also meant that weather predictions from more than about a week out are generally fairly inaccurate).The term was first recorded from Lorenz’s address at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, on December 29, 1979.

Lorenz went on to explore the underlying mathematics and published his conclusions in a seminal work titled Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow, in which he described a relatively simple system of equations that resulted in a very complicated dynamical object now known as the Lorenz attractor.

Publications

Lorenz published several books and articles. A selection:

  • 1955 Available potential energy and the maintenance of the general circulation. Tellus. Vol.7
  • 1963 Deterministic nonperiodic flow. Journal of Atmospheric Sciences. Vol.20 : 130—141 .According to the Web of Science online academic database, this paper has received at least 4000 unique citations by subsequent authors, making it one of the most-cited papers of all time.
  • 1967 The nature and theory of the general circulation of atmosphere. World Meteorological Organization. No.218
  • 1969 Three approaches to atmospheric predictability. American Meteorological Society. Vol.50
  • 1972 Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?
  • 1976 Nondeterministic theories of climate change. Quaternary Research. Vol.6
  • 1990 Can chaos and intransitivity lead to interannual variability? Tellus. Vol.42A
  • 2005 Designing Chaotic Models. Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences: Vol. 62, No. 5, pp. 1574–1587.

Awards

  • 1969 Carl Gustaf Rossby Research Medal, American Meteorological Society.
  • 1973 Symons Memorial Gold Medal, Royal Meteorological Society.
  • 1975 Fellow, National Academy of Sciences (U.S.A.).
  • 1981 Member, Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.
  • 1983 Crafoord Prize, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
  • 1984 Honorary Member, Royal Meteorological Society.
  • 1989 Elliott Cresson Medal, The Franklin Institute
  • 1991 Kyoto Prize for ‘… his boldest scientific achievement in discovering "deterministic chaos" .’.
  • 2004 Buys Ballot medal.
  • 2004 Lomonosov Gold Medal