Who discovered deterministic chaos?
Well, not too new. The French mathematical genius Poincaré studied the problem of determined but apparently unsolvable dynamic systems a hundred years ago working with the three-body problem. And the Americans Birkhoff and Smale, in addition to many others world-wide, contributed greatly to the study of dynamic systems. But its principles were rediscovered in the early 1960s by the meteorologist Edward Lorenz of MIT. While working with a simplified model in fluid dynamics, he solved the same equations twice with seemingly identical data. But on the second computer run, trying to save time on his very slow machine (this was nearly fifty years ago) and thinking it would make no difference to the outcome, he truncated his data from six to three decimal places. He was surprised to get totally different solutions. He had serendipitously rediscovered “sensitive dependence on initial conditions.” Lorenz went on to elaborate the principles of chaotic systems, and is considered to be the father
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