ABSTRACT

It’s sometimes claimed that the term “Butterfly effect,” which is used in chaos theory, arose from the 1952 Ray Bradbury short story, A Sound of Thunder. The idea is that a system that is highly dependent on initial conditions, such as the weather, may be radically different, in the long term, if a minor change, like the flapping of a butterfly’s wings, is introduced or eliminated. While Bradbury’s story is a more poetic introduction to the topic of the butterfly effect, the historic origin of the concept, without the colorful name, arose much earlier. Henri Poincare was a towering intellect who is considered by some to be “the last universalist,” that is, the last person to understand the whole of mathematics and physics, as it was known at his time. Computers would eventually produce the figures humans cannot and the latter would dub them strange attractors, but that time was still far in the future.