An anonymous reader writes “Professor Edward N. Lorenz, who discovered in 1961 that subtle changes in the initial conditions of a weather simulation program could cause very big differences in its results, died of cancer Wednesday at the age of 90. The contributions of the dad of chaos theory, who coined the term ‘the butterfly effect’ and also discovered the Lorenz Attractor, are ideal summarized by the wording of the Kyoto Prize in 1991 which noted that his discovery of chaos theory ‘profoundly influenced a wide range of basic sciences and brought about one of the most dramatic changes in mankind’s view of nature since Sir Isaac Newton.’”
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