Edward Norton Lorenz, 1917-2008

Edward Lorenz discovered that long term weather prediction is impossible and helped create the new science of chaos. Kenneth Chang has a nice obit in the New York Times

Dr. Lorenz published his findings in 1963. “The paper he wrote in 1963 is a masterpiece of clarity of exposition about why weather is unpredictable,” said J. Doyne Farmer, a professor at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico.

The following year, Dr. Lorenz published another paper that described how a small twiddling of parameters in a model could produce vastly different behavior, transforming regular, periodic events into a seemingly random chaotic pattern.

At a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1972, he gave a talk with a title that captured the essence of his ideas: “Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?”

Lorenz's worked reawakened interest in deterministic dynamical systems. Although Poincare had discovered key elements at the turn of the twentieth century, his work had largely been forgotten by the time modern computers were developed. The computer explorations of Lorenz and others brought this science back to life.

UPDATE AND CORRECTION: Robert P. points out in the comments that:

Poincare's work was not forgotten - a long series of mathematicians (Lyapunov, Birkhoff, Siegel, Kolmogorov) continued to build upon it. However, this work was almost entirely ignored by the mainstream physics community (Fermi being the only exception I know of) until Lorenz, Henon and Ford made it accessible.

I should have said that the work of Lorenz and others brought it to the attention of the broader scientific community that chaotic behavior was not just abstruse mathematics, but a phenomenon that was important for real world problems like weather prediction.

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