Chaos Theory
A BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO
CHAOS THEORY
BY GREGORY RAE
The name “chaos theory” comes from the fact that the systems that the theory describes are apparently disordered, but chaos theory is really about finding the underlying order in apparently random data.
The first true experimenter in chaos was a meteorologist named Edward Lorenz. In 1960, he was working on the problem of weather prediction. He had a computer set up with a set of twelve equations to model the weather. It didn’t predict the weather itself. However this computer program did theoretically predict what the weather might be.
One day in 1961, he wanted to see a particular sequence again. To save time, he started in the middle of the sequence, instead of the beginning. He entered the number off his printout and left to let it run.
When he came back an hour later, the sequence had evolved differently. Instead of the same pattern as before, it diverged from the pattern, ending up wildly different from the original. (See Figure 1.)
Eventually he figured out what happened.