Lemming just let me know that Edward Lorenz, whose pioneering paper on chaos (although that term had to wait a few years for Li and Yorke to invent it) in weather prediction led to coining the term "the butterfly effect", died on April 16th. Among other things, this led to a lot of work on what is called the Lorenz attractor (one of the most famous examples of a chaotic attractor).
One thing that's worth noting is that the obituaries are incorrectly crediting Lorenz with having discovered chaos. Henri Poincare' had already discovered it--without the benefit of computers!--quite a few years before.
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