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Edward Norton Lorenz was an American mathematician and meteorologist who established the theoretical basis of weather and climate predictability, as well as the basis for computer-aided atmospheric physics and meteorology. He founded modern chaos theory, a branch of mathematics focusing on the behavior of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions.
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science · American mathematician (1917–2008) · mathematician · meteorologist · university teacher · also Edward Norton Lorenz, Lorenz
Born 23 May 1917 · Died 16 April 2008 · Q174808
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By showing that certain deterministic systems have formal predictability limits, Ed put the last nail in the coffin of the Cartesian universe and fomented what some have called the third scientific revolution of the 20th century, following on the heels of relativity and quantum physics.
Two states differing by imperceptible amounts may eventually evolve into two considerably different states ... If, then, there is any error whatever in observing the present state—and in any real system such errors seem inevitable—an acceptable prediction of an instantaneous state in the distant future may well be impossible....In view of the inevitable inaccuracy and incompleteness of weather observations, precise very-long-range forecasting would seem to be nonexistent.
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“By showing that certain deterministic systems have formal predictability limits, Ed put the last nail in the coffin of the Cartesian universe and fomented what some have called the third scientific revolution of the 20th century, following on the heels of relativity and quantum physics.”
“Two states differing by imperceptible amounts may eventually evolve into two considerably different states ... If, then, there is any error whatever in observing the present state—and in any real system such errors seem inevitable—an acceptable prediction of an instantaneous state in the distant future may well be impossible....In view of the inevitable inaccuracy and incompleteness of weather observations, precise very-long-range forecasting would seem to be nonexistent.”
Published “High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models” in 2022 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) — cited 15,411 times.
A short documentary was made about Lorenz's immense scientific legacy on everything from how we predict weather to our understanding of the universe
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The Lorenz Center, a climate think tank devoted to fundamental scientific inquiry, was founded at MIT in honor of Lorenz and his pioneering work on chaos theory and climate science
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Died 2008-04-16.
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Lorenz died at his home in Cambridge from cancer at the age of 90
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Won Buys Ballot Medal (2004).
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Won Lomonosov Gold Medal (2004).
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Buys Ballot Medal of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences
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Awarded International Meteorological Organization Prize (2000).
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Won Roger Revelle Medal (1992).
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Awarded Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences (1991).
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The Buys Ballot Award in 2004, and the Tomassoni Award in 2008
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Awarded Foreign Member of the Royal Society (1990).
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Won Elliott Cresson Medal (1989).
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Awarded Crafoord Prize in Geosciences (1983).
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Along with colleague Henry Stommel, he was awarded the Crafoord Prize from the Swedish Academy of Sciences, considered to be nearly equal to a Nobel Prize
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The MIT Department of Meteorology and Physical Oceanography merged with the Department of Geology to become the current MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, where Lorenz remained a professor befor
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Won Symons Gold Medal (1973).
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Won Carl-Gustaf Rossby Research Medal (1969).
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Lorenz published a landmark paper, titled "The Nature and Theory of the General Circulation of the Atmosphere," on atmospheric circulation from an energetic perspective, which advanced the concept of available potential
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Lorenz, with the assistance of Margaret Hamilton, was using a simple digital computer, a Royal McBee LGP-30, to simulate weather patterns by modeling 12 variables, representing things like temperature and wind speed
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Became an assistant professor in the department and was promoted to professor in 1962
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Lorenz took over leadership of a project at MIT that ran complex simulations of weather models that he used to evaluate statistical forecasting techniques
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Joined the MIT Department of Meteorology as a research scientist
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Studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1946–1948).
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Studied at Harvard University (1938–1941).
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Studied at Dartmouth College (1938).
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And a master's degree in mathematics from Harvard in 1940
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Born 1917-05-23.
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