the.com/chaos theory
a butterfly flaps its wings and your flight gets cancelled — that's the whole field.
means the study of how simple, deterministic systems can produce wildly unpredictable behavior when they're extremely sensitive to starting conditions.
from born in 1961 when meteorologist edward lorenz reran a weather simulation with a rounded input, 0.506 instead of 0.506127, and got a totally different forecast — he'd accidentally discovered that tiny errors explode over time.
the namelorenz called it the butterfly effect in a 1972 talk
not randomdeterministic — same start always gives same result
everywhereapplies to weather, hearts, economies, dripping faucets
fractalsmandelbrot's fractals are chaos theory's visual signature