Where does the concept of butterfly effect come from?

Butterfly effect is a chaotic phenomenon, which means that in a dynamic system, small changes in initial conditions can drive a long-term huge chain reaction of the whole system.

Edward lorenz, an American meteorologist, analyzed this influence in the paper 1963 submitted to the New York Academy of Sciences. "A meteorologist mentioned that if this theory is proved to be correct, a seagull flapping its wings is enough to change the weather forever." In later speeches and papers, he used more poetic butterflies. The most common explanation for this effect is: "A butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil will cause a butterfly in Texas a month later.

The source of this sentence is that meteorologists have made a computer program that can simulate climate change and represent it with images. Finally, he found that these images were chaotic, very similar to the wings of butterflies, so he explained the image vividly in the way of "butterflies flapping their wings", so he had the above statement.

Butterfly effect is usually used in weather, stock market and other complex systems that are difficult to predict in a certain period of time. This effect shows that the result of the development of things is extremely sensitive to the initial conditions, and the smallest deviation of the initial conditions will cause great differences in the results.

Butterfly effect is used in sociology to explain a bad micro-mechanism, which will bring great harm to society if it is not guided and adjusted in time, and is dubbed as "tornado" or "storm"; A good micro-mechanism, under the correct guidance and after a period of hard work, will produce a sensational effect, or a revolution.

The butterfly effect often appears in chaos, which is also called nonlinearity.