On the butterfly effect

Wow - today at work we were having a meeting wrapping up a pilot study that three of us have been doing for the past year - myself, my good friend Z, and N, whom we've been getting to know through this project. And N. told us she'd just returned from Boston, where MIT was having a celebration of the 100th anniversary of her father's birth. Apparently he was the pioneer of chaos theory who came up with the famous idea of the "butterfly effect" - that the flapping of a butterfly's wings in Brazil could set off a tornado in Texas. Here's his New York Times obituary - N. is the "Cheryl" quoted in the article. And here's what MIT had to say about him.