How chaos theory revolutionized modern weather and science

The story that led the mathematician to formalize one of the foundations of science in the second half of the twentieth century. Until the famous conference in 1972, where he wondered if a butterfly could trigger a tornado in Texas

One of the most important discoveries and one of the most famous – and misrepresented – images of science arises in a rather singular way. It is in the middle of the freezing winter of 1961, in the Boston area the temperature drops to -17 degrees Celsius. The mathematician and meteorologist Edward Norton Lorenz he’s working in his studio at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Mild mannered” the biographers describe him. A quiet man, dedicated to his work, fascinated by changes in the weather since he was a child, when from his family home in West Hardford, Connecticut he was struck by a total solar eclipse. Since, he spent the afternoons measuring and recording the maximum and minimum temperatures, solving math problems and playing chess against his father and mother, beating them both. During the war he worked in the weather service in the air force. While increasingly accurate data is available, weather forecasts at the time were still mostly “intuitive guesses.”