Mathematician, meteorologist and father of chaos theory, Edward Lorenz has died in Massachusetts at the age of 90. Australian scientists comment below.

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Kurt Lambeck is Professor of Geophysics at the Australian National University (ANU) and President of the Australian Academy of Science.

“Ed Lorenz is widely known for formulating the concept of chaos theory in simple terms such that today we are amazed by its simplicity. Chaos theory helps us understand the importance of getting your starting conditions right when you are trying to predict how a system will behave in the future, for example. If you begin your calculations with numbers that are not quite correct, small anomalies can suddenly become very significant and steer your solution off track.

This is relevant in the concept of trying to understand climate change. We perturb a system by small amounts, each one seems insignificant, but the consequence could be that the whole system takes off in a different direction. Chaos theory emphasizes the instability in many physical systems, where traditionally we have thought they were stable.”

David Karoly is Professor and Federation Fellow in the School of Earth Sciences, University of Melbourne, and a lead author on the IPCC 4th Assessment Report.

“Ed Lorenz is best known for his pioneering research on chaos and the predictability of weather and climate. But he was also an outstanding teacher, making sure to present complex ideas in simple ways. He showed an uncanny ability to distil the complexity of the atmosphere or the climate system into just a few simple equations, and then explain the behaviour of those systems in new and insightful ways.”