RIP Edward Lorenz

Published: April 18, 2008
Tags: mathematics physics science chaos theory

I got an SMS from a friend this afternoon letting me know that Edward Lorenz had died.

Lorenz was a meteorologist at MIT and more or less the father of chaos theory. I later joked with another friend that 2008 seems to be turning out to be the year that God decided he hates nerds - in less than two months we've lost Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons, Arthur C. Clarke, science fiction author extraordinaire, John Wheeler, accomplished physicist and the one who coined the term "black hole" and now Lorenz. I wonder if Stephen Hawking will last the year...

Of all of these deaths, Lorenz's has probably saddened me the most. I first learned about Lorenz in my penultimate year of high school, from reading Jame's Gleick's classic popular introduction to chaos theory, the appropriately named Chaos. If I recall correctly I purchased that book after attending and being fascinated by a sort of combined lecture and computer experimenting session given by a mathematician at the University of South Australia the year before, as part of an "IT Careers Forum" that I attended. I distinctly recall having my imagination firmly captured by this book's opening paragraph, describing numerical weather simulations that Lorenz ran in the 1960s, on a computer which was probably quite literally less powerful than the digital watch I wear today:

The sun beat down through a sky that had never seen clouds. The winds swept across an earth as smooth as glass. Night never came, and autumn never gave way to winter. It never rained. The simulated weather in Edward Lorenz's new electronic computer changed slowly but certainly, drifting through a permanent dry midday season, as if the world had turned into Camelot, or some particularly bland version of southern California.

It sounds kind of cheesy now, but the idea of an entire world which existed as nothing more than a mathematical model running inside a computer fascinated me at the time, and in honesty it still does. I re-read Chaos, and other, more technical books on chaos theory and dynamical systems in general early on at university. These books were brimming with excitement at the idea that the unrelenting reductionism which had taken us so far in physics was starting to show its limits and that if we wanted to understand, say, the behaviour of clouds we had to stop thinking of clouds as a collection of countless individual particles, each with its own position, velocity, temperature and pressure, and instead to look for some new, more all-encompassing, purely mathematical ways to look at the system. This sense of enthusiasm was probably entirely stale by the time I read about it in the 21st century, but nevertheless this stuff was definitely a substantial contributing factor in my eventual decision to major in mathematics instead of physics.

I haven't really thought about chaos theory much in recent years, after my eventual wandering into the territory of pure mathematics and cryptography, and my now having ending up in statistical language modelling, but it definitely had an important influence on the person I've become. It remains a really very fascinating, if often overlooked, part of our exploration of the world, and a comparatively very accessible one for the lay person. It's sad to see its founder go.