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※ [本文轉錄自 image 看板]
: MIT Prof, Father of Chaos Theory Dies
: (WASHINGTON) — Edward Lorenz, the father of chaos theory, died at his home
: in Cambridge, Mass., Wednesday. He was 90.
: He was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when he came
: up with the scientific concept that small effects lead to big changes,
: something that became known as the "butterfly effect." He explained how
: something as minuscule as a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil changes
: the constantly moving atmosphere in ways that could later trigger tornadoes
: in Texas.
: His discovery of "deterministic chaos" brought about "one of the most
: dramatic changes in mankind's view of nature since Sir Isaac Newton," said
: the committee that awarded Lorenz the 1991 Kyoto Prize for basic sciences. It
: was one of many scientific awards that Lorenz won.
: Lorenz, a meteorologist, came up with the chaos theory concept in the 1960s
: through his own meticulous work habits, said Kevin Trenberth, a student of
: Lorenz's. Trenberth is now climate analysis chief at the National Center for
: Atmospheric Research.
: He inadvertently ran what seemed like the same calculations through a creaky
: computer twice and came up with vastly different answers. When he tried to
: figure out what happened, he noticed a slight decimal point change — less
: than 0.0001 — wound up leading to significant error. That error became a
: seminal scientific paper, presented in 1972, about the butterfly effect.
: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1731603,00.html
Lorenz於家中過世享年90歲，他生前是麻省理工的教授，他提出"小變動造成大影響"
的科學概念，就是我們知道的蝴蝶效應---巴西蝴蝶揮動翅膀的擾動，會影響德州
的龍捲風。
他的混沌理論帶給我們自從牛頓以降對於自然看法的轉變，在1991年獲頒了Kyoto Prize
基礎科學獎，這只是他獲得的眾多獎項其中之一。Lorenz本身是氣象學家出身，他在
1960年開始發展他的混沌理論概念，他平常就養成嚴謹的工作態度習慣，有一次在
電腦計算中發現巨大的誤差。他試圖建構描述這樣的一種情形，他注意到最初小於萬分
之一小數點的誤差，最後會造成明顯的錯誤。他把他的蝴蝶效應的發現寫成論文投稿，
在1972年刊出。
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※ 編輯: hero1020 來自: 163.32.239.23 (04/28 16:03)