"Does the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?" Might sound like the type of question posed by science fiction explorers to reveal the precarity of time travel, but in reality it's the title of an MIT professor's 1972 paper presented in a Sheraton conference room to members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Meteorologist Edward Lorenz wrote the paper, and while the concept seems far-fetched, the analogy actually highlights an idea underlying everything from planetary motion to climate change: chaos.
More precisely, this example works to explain a kind of math called chaos theory, which looks at how small changes made to a system's initial conditions—like the extra gust of wind from a butterfly's wings—can result in seemingly unpredictable behavior. (For example, a tornado in Texas.)
While mathematicians wouldn't necessarily call themselves chaos theorists today, the theory does play a role in the study of dynamical systems, which Kevin Lin, associate professor of math at the University of Arizona, says helps us study everything from climate change to neuroscience.
"Chaos is a fact of life … and a part of dynamical systems theory," Lin explains to Popular Mechanics in an email. "Some systems are inherently chaotic, while others are not. Many [mathematicians] are also very interested in how certain systems can exhibit both types of behavior, and transition between these different regimes under different conditions."
"Does the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?" Might sound like the type of question posed by science fiction explorers to reveal the precarity of time travel, but in reality it's the title of an MIT professor's 1972 paper presented in a Sheraton conference room to members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Meteorologist Edward Lorenz wrote the paper, and while the concept seems far-fetched, the analogy actually highlights an idea underlying everything from planetary motion to climate change: chaos.
More precisely, this example works to explain a kind of math called chaos theory, which looks at how small changes made to a system's initial conditions—like the extra gust of wind from a butterfly's wings—can result in seemingly unpredictable behavior. (For example, a tornado in Texas.)
While mathematicians wouldn't necessarily call themselves chaos theorists today, the theory does play a role in the study of dynamical systems, which Kevin Lin, associate professor of math at the University of Arizona, says helps us study everything from climate change to neuroscience.
"Chaos is a fact of life … and a part of dynamical systems theory," Lin explains to Popular Mechanics in an email. "Some systems are inherently chaotic, while others are not. Many [mathematicians] are also very interested in how certain systems can exhibit both types of behavior, and transition between these different regimes under different conditions." |
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