Edward Lorenz

Edward Norton Lorenz is an American scientist born the May 23rd 1917 with West Hartford, in the Connecticut.

Its contributions

Working like Meteorologist with the Massachusetts Institute off Technology, he discovers in 1963 that one can obtain a chaotic behavior with only three variables, that is to say a nonlinear system with three degrees of freedom. He thus shows that a very complex dynamics can appear in a system formally very simple. The apprehension of the reports/ratios of simple and the complex is some deeply upset. In particular, one realizes that complexity can be intrinsic with a system, whereas up to that point one rather brought it back to an extrinsic character, accidental, related to a multitude of causes.

At Lorenz, the intervention of the computer is crucial. The sensitivity to the initial conditions is indeed revealed by the means of the instability of a numerical calculation and it is in 1972 qu ' Edward Lorenz present the Effet butterfly in front of American Association for the advance in knowledge with a famous question: " Can the beat of wing of a butterfly in Brazil start a tornado in Texas? "

But, especially, Lorenz exhibe on its screen of computer the surprising image of attractile sound . In its work of celestial mechanics, Henri Poincaré had had the intuition of it, but it had evoked it by obscure sentences. Lorenz, explains its construction by iterative procedures to him and gives it to see.

It will be necessary then nearly fifteen years so that these results are included/understood and assimilated by different scientific groups, meteorologists with the mathematicians, astronomers with the physicists, the biologists of the populations, etc It receives in 2004 the Médaille Buys Ballot for its contribution with meteorology.

External bond

Web page on the attractile strange one

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