“According to legend, Lorenz devised these equations as a toy weather model (picking parameter values that would produce results mimicking unsta- ble convection patterns in the atmosphere) and had a computer (a Royal McBee LGP-30) churn out numerical solutions. At one point he restarted the computation using intermediate values from the computation’s output, only to discover that seemingly insignificant roundoff—the machine computed to six digits, but reported only three—caused the restarted computation to quickly diverge from its previous output. Lorenz’s report of this sensitivity to initial conditions was one of the slow-burning embers that ultimately erupted in the blaze of chaos theory that swept across physics in the 1980s. Though emblematic of chaos, the Lorenz system was not truly known to be chaotic until 2002, when Warwick Tucker, now at the University of Uppsala in Sweden, proved that the attractor is indeed “strange,” the mathematical term of art for an attractor that displays sensitivity to initial conditions.” /via:ajnabee
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“According to legend, Lorenz devised these equations as a toy weather model (picking parameter values that would produce results mimicking unsta- ble convection patterns in the atmosphere) and had a computer (a Royal McBee LGP-30) churn out numerical solutions. At one point he restarted the computation using intermediate values from the computation’s output, only to discover that seemingly insignificant roundoff—the machine computed to six digits, but reported only three—caused the restarted computation to quickly diverge from its previous output. Lorenz’s report of this sensitivity to initial conditions was one of the slow-burning embers that ultimately erupted in the blaze of chaos theory that swept across physics in the 1980s. Though emblematic of chaos, the Lorenz system was not truly known to be chaotic until 2002, when Warwick Tucker, now at the University of Uppsala in Sweden, proved that the attractor is indeed “strange,” the mathematical term of art for an attractor that displays sensitivity to initial conditions.”

/via:ajnabee

(via mattermedia)

Source: ajnabee

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