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Edward Lorenz

A man wearing glasses and a light-colored shirt sits against a dark background, looking directly at the camera with a serious expression.

American mathematician and meteorologist (1917–2008), trained at Dartmouth and Harvard, who spent his working life at MIT modelling the atmosphere. His 1963 paper "Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow" is the founding document of chaos theory, though it sat largely unread for a decade. He coined no terminology; the phrase "butterfly effect" was attached to his work by a conference organiser in 1972 and stuck because the picture his equations made looked like wings.

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