History Edward Norton Lorenz is meteorologist fascinated with a new technology capable of revolutionizing his field: the computer. While his first collegiate degree was in mathematics, his service in world war II rekindled a fascination with the weather. He would later return to school to obtain two more degrees related to meteorology. While working as a meteorologist, he possessed a LGP-30 desk computer that had the capability of running weather simulations in what could be described as an idyllic world- one without all the pesky rough edges our earth is covered with. Instead, it modeled the weather patterns as a function of 12 simple variables.

One day, having observed what he thought were some interesting weather patterns in the simulation, Lorenz took note of the system conditions with the intention of returning to the simulation at a later point in time.

Later on, he would input those same values into the computer, leave for a bit to let the simulation run, and return to find something surprising: the simulation had began modeling a drastically different pattern than what had been printed previously. Believing human error to be the root cause of the discrepancy, he double checked all values used on the two days. They were the same- or at least, that was what appeared to be true. Upon further examination of the program, Lorenz discovered a difference in one of the inputs. While the computer used 6 decimal numerical values in its operation, to the user, it would output but 3. When the meteorologist ran the program a second time, he would used this slightly less acurate value for one of the variables. The diverging patterns in the two simulations was caused by an innocuous difference in numerical values on the order of a ten thousandth.

While this episode might have been written off by many as being a mere curiousity, this event sparked life into the mathematical mind of Lorenz. This spark would rekindle interest into a little studied and unnamed branch of mathematics that would later be dubbed Chaos Theory.

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