Interesting papers to read 6
Piero Giacomelli
CIO | Group IT Manager at Fidia Farmaceutici SpA | Packtpub Book Author | Manning Publication Reviewer | Passionate about math
My suggestion for today is the paper
"Deterministic nonperiodic flow"
by Edward Lorenz
With his astonishing 27K citation this paper is largely considered the foundation paper on Chaos Theory even if it was published on a relatively obscure Journal in 1963 (for the history behind Lorenz ans his studies I strongly suggest the good book "Chaos: Making a New Science" by James Glieck).
In this paper, Lorenz introduced the concept of chaos to the scientific community, and showed how even simple systems can exhibit unpredictable behavior.
领英推荐
Lorenz's work was motivated by his study of weather forecasting. He was interested in understanding how small changes in the initial conditions of the atmosphere could lead to large changes in the weather over time. To study this, he developed a simple model of the atmosphere, consisting of three differential equations.
Lorenz found that even this simple model could exhibit chaotic behavior. If he started the model with slightly different initial conditions, he would get different results. This meant that it was impossible to make accurate predictions about the weather more than a few days in advance.
Lorenz's work had a profound impact on the way scientists think about complex systems. It showed that even systems that are deterministic, in the sense that they are governed by fixed laws of physics, can exhibit unpredictable behavior. This has implications for many fields, such as economics, biology, and climate science.
It demonstrated that small changes in the initial conditions can have large effects on the long-term behavior of a system. This is known as the butterfly effect. The butterfly effect has important implications for many fields, such as weather forecasting and climate change.
Lorenz's paper was a major breakthrough in our understanding of complex systems. This has had a profound impact on the way scientists think about complex systems, and has inspired a new field of study called chaos theory.