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Animating the Lorenz Attractor with Python

Edward Lorenz, the father of chaos theory, once described chaos as “when the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future.”

Lorenz first discovered chaos by accident while developing a simple mathematical model of atmospheric convection, using three ordinary differential equations. He found that nearly indistinguishable initial conditions could produce completely divergent outcomes, rendering weather prediction impossible beyond a time horizon of about a fortnight.

Lorenz system attractor animated GIF created with Python matplotlib scipy numpy PIL