Edward Lorenz and the Chaotic Butterflies

Tiny changes in a system dramatically affecting the course of much larger events—what we know of as “the Butterfly Effect”—was demonstrated in 1960 by a mathematician and meteorologist named Edward Lorenz. It was an accidental discovery, but like the concept itself, it led to something much larger—something that has been called one of the twentieth century’s great revolutions in the physical sciences: chaos theory.