chaos and the LGP-30

Will Cooke via cctalk wrote: What I think is most awesome, in terms of the role that computing held in this discovery, is that mathematicians since the early 20th century took as granted the idea that the "limit sets" of the trajectories of solutions of time-differential equations were either periodic (also called limit cycles)? or singletons (stable or unstable equilibria at a single point in space).? Lorenz, through digital integration of a simple third-order differential equation, proved that there were other kinds of limit sets.? These limit sets are distributed in space and occupy geometries that we now call "fractal".? When they are the result of a chaotic solution to a differential equation, we call them "strange attractors".? The first one that was studied was Lorenz's strange attractor, which, in 3D space, looks like a butterfly. I don't know if there is any connection between its shape and the popular "butterfly altering an initial airflow in the dynosaur's era" interpretation (by the way, utterly dumb for anyone who knows about real-life nonlinear dynamical systems).? But what I do know, is that mathematicians had to suddenly backtrack 50 years and try to understand how they could be so wrong.? And that's how chaos theory emerged.? Thanks to numerical computation. carlos.