1917-

American Mathematician and Meteorologist

Edward Norton Lorenz is known for his pioneering work on chaos theory as a way of explaining atmospheric science. He established the theoretical basis of weather and climate predictability as well as the tools used for computer-aided atmospheric physics and meteorology. His "butterfly theory" influenced a wide-range of basic sciences and has contributed to significant changes in the ways that scientists view nature, the universe, and the future direction of mathematics and science.

Lorenz was born May 23, 1917, in West Hartford, Connecticut. He graduated from Dartmouth College with an undergraduate degree in mathematics (1938) and later earned a master's from Harvard (1940) and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1948). He taught mathematics at Harvard during the 1941-42 academic year and served as a weather forecaster with the U.S. Army Corp from 1942-46.

In 1946 Lorenz began his meteorology career...