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The digital painting, "Butterfly Effect - Homage to Lorenz", by Gloria King Merritt, and related video art titled "Butterly Effect - Transformation", are inspired by the scientific work Edward Norton Lorenz, an American mathematician, meteorologist, and a pioneer of chaos theory. He introduced the strange attractor notion and coined the term "butterfly effect".

Lorenz built a mathematical model of the way air moves around in the atmosphere. As Lorenz studied weather patterns he began to realize that they did not always change as predicted. Minute variations in the initial values of variables in his twelve-variable computer weather model would result in grossly divergent weather patterns. This sensitive dependence on initial conditions came to be known as the butterfly effect.

 

Lorenz is also considered the father of Chaos Theory.

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