Lorenz and the Butterfly Effect

Lorenz soon found that his error was a seemingly trivial one. He had rounded the numbers he wrote down to three decimal places, while the computer stored values to six decimal places. Simply rounding to the nearest thousandth had created a tiny error that propagated throughout the system, creating drastic differences in the final result. This is the origin of the term “butterfly effect”, where infinitesimal initial inputs can cause huge results. Lorenz had discovered the first chaotic dynamical system.